The first casualty of war is truth, according to an adage often attributed to U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917, the year the U.S. entered World War 1. Over a century later, as we live through an event that a senior U.S. defense official dubbed the largest conventional warfare operation in Europe since World War II, warfare erodes truth again.
NBC News reports that Facebook and Twitter removed anti-Ukrainian fake profiles over the weekend. The fake Facebook profiles were connected to a Russian propaganda campaign called “Ukraine Today.” The first fake profile was “Vladimir Bondarenko,” a blogger from Kyiv who spreads anti-Ukrainian propaganda. The computer-generated photo of him looks mostly real, besides a weird bend in his ear. Another fake profile is “Irina Kerimova,” a Kharkiv-based guitar teacher-turned editor-in-chief of the “Ukraine Today” website. Like “Vladimir Bondarenko,” her photo seems normal until you look close enough.
