Dan Scott said:
I know we are getting a lot of news from twitter but I haven't seen twitter fact check anything yet. Have you guys? I was thinking Ukraine/Russia misinformation would be more dangerous than Covid.
The open source community has been doing a pretty good job of verifying information and policing itself. Sure some of the information is 12-24 hours old when you see troop movements videos, but a lot of the information that we are seeing is coming from Telegram, Facebook, and videos from TikTok (keep posting Ivan). Telegram is where the information of the prerecorded evacuation messages for the breakaway regions came from.
That said, this morning there's been more conflicting reports of Russian troop movements near Mariupol. The community seems split on whether the videos have come from the Belgorod region, east near Mariupol, or are from 2015. While the OSINT community definitely will try to verify the authenticity, I think we're about to see the community begin to work against itself if Russia's disinformation campaign begins to kick in more so than it already is.
Yesterday and today many of the Twitter pages have been basically brigaded with flags/reporting leading to disabled accounts. Seems like the Russians/bot farms are starting to put in work to stop the dissemination of freely available information.