The new year was barely a minute old when Ukraine’s military forces unleashed a barrage of rockets on a school in the Russian-occupied east of their country. The sunrise revealed a grim scene: at least 89 dead Russian soldiers. Russia’s military blamed the troops for revealing their position with their cell phones. But one Russian pro-war hard-liner told his 295,000 readers the bigger problem was “the banal negligence of the commanders.” Another pro-war Russian blogger sent his 1.3 million followers a video from the wreckage: “The death toll is growing as the rubble is cleared,” he said.
Truth, as the saying goes, is the first casualty of war. Yet the war in Ukraine—one year old on Feb. 24—has brought not so much a mess of unverifiable tales, but a firehose of online information, true and untrue, from both sides. That includes details of the New Year’s attack, one of the deadliest incidents since Russia invaded Ukraine, igniting Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II. Just as striking as the quantity of information is that much of it is being disseminated on a single messaging app, one headquartered thousands of miles from tech giants like Twitter and Meta, and one that only about 20 million Americans use: Telegram.
