Experts worry about the accuracy of online posts depicting the war in Ukraine

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Social media is awash with satellite photos and cell phone videos of the war in Ukraine. The speed and scale at which this information is being disseminated is unprecedented. But as NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reports, some experts worry that the picture painted by online publications may not always be accurate.

GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: Jeffrey Lewis saw the invasion before it started on Google Maps. This is how it happened. His team was using commercial satellites to observe a Russian military unit.

JEFFREY LEWIS: Tanks, armored personnel carriers, the whole nine yards.

BRUMFIEL: The unit was out of the Russian city of Belgorod. Vehicles were lined up on the road as if they were about to go somewhere.

LEWIS: We said that unit is prepared to dive into the Ukraine.

BRUMFIEL: Lewis is a professor of gun control at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey. He and his team wanted to know how long it would take for the unit to reach the border. So they did what anyone would do. They connected him to Google. And he guesses what.

LEWIS: There was a traffic jam that started exactly where that armored unit was located. And it extended to the border with Ukraine. And it was 3:00 in the morning.

BRUMFIEL: In Russia. In other words, the armored column was on the move, obstructing the roads. The invasion had begun. Lewis tweeted what his team had found. About an hour later, Putin declared the start of Russia's military offensive.

This is the speed at which information travels in the Ukraine war. Cell phones and commercial satellites provide a flood of data on troop movements, attacks and fleeing civilians. It's all there for all to see.

LEWIS: All of this data is collected and sent to social media, where we can see it.

BRUMFIEL: And there is a small army of semi-professional investigators who are searching a lot. Ross Burley is the chief executive of the Center for Information Resilience, a UK group that is helping to collect and collate all the videos on the ground.

ROSS BURLEY: Researchers and volunteers are scouring Telegram, Twitter, Twitch and all the different social media platforms you can think of, collecting everything they see, and it all goes into the database.

BRUMFIEL: The group collects about a hundred posts a day. Those who get verified are taken to a real-time map to show where the fighting is happening. Burley says these videos could also become valuable evidence.

BURLEY: Personally, I hope that our work can inform future trials and that there is a degree of accountability for people involved in war crimes and things like that.

BRUMFIEL: While some groups try to collate everything to get a clearer picture of the big picture, most people only see a handful of posts that get the most likes and shares. And that can sometimes be misleading. Take, for example, a TikTok video of an attractive woman showing how to start a Russian armored vehicle.

(TIKTOK SOUNDBITE)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking Russian).

BRUMFIEL: The video has over 7 million views. One person who saw it was Rita Konaev of Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology. She says that when this video first aired...

RITA KONAEV: It was depicted as having been taken over by Ukrainian forces or resistance. And that's not who he was.

BRUMFIEL: According to a Reuters fact check, the woman is a Russian auto mechanic and vlogger. She filmed herself weeks before the invasion of Russia, driving the armored car for fun.

(TIKTOK SOUNDBITE)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking Russian).

KONAEV: While that's not a significant thing, I think it tells part of a larger story about the kinds of things that get amplified.

BRUMFIEL: It turns out that social media during a war is like social media the rest of the time. The funny how to drive a tank video gets a lot of likes and shares, as do videos that show people what they want to see. Konaev says the problem is that these videos, even the real ones, show only a small part of what's really going on. And when a video of some Russian soldiers surrendering goes viral...

KONAEV: Then it starts to lead into these narratives about, you know, mass desertion, mutiny: Russian troops are about to turn around.

BRUMFIEL: That story, frankly, doesn't seem to be true. Konaev understands why so many people are drawn to social media and why they feel the need to share what they see.

KONAEV: You want to feel like you understand the situation. You want to feel like you're contributing, that you're involved, that you're aware because this is a catastrophic event.

BRUMFIEL: Remember, he says, social media likes short, simple stories. This war is something bigger, darker and more difficult to understand.

Geoff Brumfield, NPR News.

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