Fact-Checking as Defence Against Propaganda in the Digital Age

Abstract

The propaganda machinery is getting increasingly sophisticated in the Digital Age that generates new tools both for spreading information and for verifying it. The wave of civil conflicts has turned attention to fact-checking over the past years. Since 2014, as Ukraine has been in conflict, Russia has launched propaganda against Ukraine on a large scale, therefore fact-checking became a very important topic. These efforts to build a false image of Ukraine caused the launch of some crowdsourcing projects in investigative journalism. This paper analyses the common-used propaganda techniques in the informational warfare that had impact on the Ukrainian crisis and at the same time presents some examples of debunking untrue information by “StopFake”, a Ukrainian national fact-checking team.