EDGE OF REALITY

A battle in the Russia-Ukraine conflict is being waged across social media. But who is winning the infowars?

- Dan Milmo and Pjotr Sauer

Speaking behind a podium bearing the Ukrainian state emblem, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his now signature green attire, calls on his soldiers to lay down their weapons and return to their families.

The one -minute clip is a deepfake, the term for a sophisticated hoax that uses artificial intelligence to create a phoney image, most commonly fake videos of people.

What unfolded next was one of the latest episodes in the infowar that has accompanied the Russia-Ukraine conflict, a war being waged across social media, via satellite images of battlefields and on hackers’ keyboards.

Zelenskiy posted a bona fide response on his Instagram account last week dismissing the “childish provocation” and telling Russian troops to return home. His response to the deepfake, which remains of unknown provenance and is not of a high quality, received more than 5m views.

Social media platforms swung into action as well. Facebook and Instagram’s owner, Meta, said it had removed the video from its services and tipped offother platforms after the deepfake appeared on a reportedly hacked Ukrainian news site and started spreading across the internet. Twitter said it was “actively” tracking the video and removing it if it was being displayed without comment or held up as real.