"War on Fakes": The Fake Fact Checking Website and Telegram Channel

Several strange and scary news items continue to come out of Russia, particularly relating to the war on Ukraine. And a misleading “fact-checking” channel that is clearly spreading Russian propaganda is not particularly out of character. Meet “War on Fakes,” the channel that claims to “dissect fakes and give links to rebuttals,” according to its description on Telegram. The official website says that it aims to “provide unbiased information” to counter “an information war launched against Russia.” 

But it’s unusual—the posts it makes are completely and totally incoherent. 

Some posts claim Hollywood producers were crossing into Ukraine from Poland to make the horrors of war look worse. Others claimed actor Sean Penn was involved in the making of these movies, creating noise and further adding to the din of misinformation flooding Russia’s news sources, rendering the people unable to trust any concept of the truth presented by the media. 

The truth is that nobody knows who is truly behind this: even looking at source code only reveals that it is maintained with nine user accounts. And these accounts are spreading disinformation that is contrary to Russia’s human rights abuses during the Ukrainian invasion. By dissociating people’s perception of reality, the strategy seeks to convince people that any perception of the truth is relative, or that people can construct their “own truth.” 

The problem is that the Russian people are bombarded with this messaging: messaging like the extreme pro-Russia nationalism consistent in “War on Fakes” is consistent with the deliberately false information in the Russian media. And “War On Fakes” is more than likely directly involved with—if not an actual arm of—the Russian government: A review by PolitiFact showed that the official Telegram channels of the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs together shared 29 stories by War on Fakes between March and July.

It’s also become far easier for the government and fake news outlets to put out the news, because Russian propagandists are “surprisingly nimble,” according to a RAND Corporation analysis: 

“Due to their lack of commitment to objective reality (discussed later), Russian propagandists do not need to wait to check facts or verify claims; they just disseminate an interpretation of emergent events that appears to best favor their themes and objectives.”

The misinformation also follows clear formulas and reuses and recycles those formulas over and over again, making it a game of misinformation mad libs for propagandists to create, broadcasters to disseminate, and these arms of the misinformation campaign to retweet and amplify and send to anybody’s inbox. 

The loud traffic of misinformation threatens the stability of the public’s trust in any source of actual information. Getting the leg up on someone seeing this information, particularly those susceptible to misinformation who will then see it repeated everywhere, is essential, but the truth takes time to acquire.

However, journalists still have a duty to that truth, despite the difficulty of getting the necessary information through to the people both in Russia and in Ukraine, where the country is unable to generate consistent news on its own, and people are largely relying on apps like Telegram for information.