Peer-reviewed research

This paper started with a question I could not leave alone: why does misinformation spread faster than the truth, and what can actually be done about it?

Using the Russian-Ukrainian war as a case study, the paper traces how misinformation operates across platforms, from encrypted apps like Telegram to the algorithm-driven feeds of TikTok and Instagram. It maps the specific types used in the conflict, military and political, and the methods through which they spread: recontextualised images, fake eyewitness accounts and coordinated troll networks.

The same claim does not behave the same way in an encrypted group as it does in a ranked feed, which is why a remedy designed for one fails in the other.

Weighing the two responses actually in use, both have worked to some degree and both fall short in different ways. Platform self-regulation is inconsistent and shaped by profit. State regulation risks becoming a censorship tool, particularly where governments are themselves sources of misinformation. Russia’s framing of its invasion as a special military operation is the clearest example of that risk.

The conclusion is a hybrid rather than a single fix: platforms as the first line of defence, state regulation reserved for high-stakes situations and international cooperation to create standards that individual nations cannot enforce alone. Underneath it is the claim I have not been able to get away from. Reactive regulation will always lag behind misinformation, and the only durable solution is a proactive digital environment where accuracy is structurally incentivised, not just occasionally enforced.

The paper describes how claims travelled and what the available remedies do. It does not establish what anyone came to believe as a result, and it does not test the hybrid model it proposes. It studies one conflict, and I would not claim the pattern holds for a conflict with a different information environment around it.