MOSCOW – To understand the complexity of monitoring disinformation online, consider the small Ukrainian fact-checking group StopFake.
Earlier this year, Facebook hired StopFake to help stem the flow of Russian propaganda and other fake news through its platform in Ukraine.
StopFake, like all of Facebook’s external fact checkers, signed a pledge not to be partisan and not to focus their checks “anywhere.” But in recent weeks, StopFake has been fighting accusations of ties to the Ukrainian far right and bias in its fact-checking. The episode has raised thorny questions for Facebook about who is allowed to separate truth from lies, and who is considered a neutral fact checker in a country at war.
“They are training these organizations and these people to make calls about what kind of information, what kind of opinions, what kinds of communications are illegitimate or legitimate,” Matthew Schaaf, who heads the Ukraine office of the American human rights group Freedom House said of Facebook and its fact checkers. “The question to ask yourself is: Do these people deserve our trust?”
A Ukrainian media outlet, Zaborona, published an article this month citing photos of a prominent StopFake member meeting with nationalist figures, including a white-powered rock musician whose lyrics deny the Holocaust. StopFake denied having far-right ties or biases, calling Zaborona’s article part of a slanderous “information attack” campaign.
Zaborona editor Katerina Sergatskova said she fled Ukraine on Wednesday after receiving death threats. (StopFake has condemned the threats). On Facebook, some of her critics had claimed, without proof, that she was a Kremlin agent.
The episode highlights the high risks that American social media companies face when trying to respond to disinformation at geopolitical hot spots around the world. After being criticized for not stopping the spread of disinformation during the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States, Facebook tried to avoid becoming an arbiter of truth by creating a third-party fact-checking program.
The program now includes more than 50 organizations that verify facts in more than 40 languages, including global news agencies like Agence France-Presse and Reuters along with smaller groups like StopFake.
Yevhen Fedchenko, editor-in-chief of StopFake, declined to comment for this article. He has told other media that he plans to file a lawsuit to defend StopFake’s reputation, and wrote in an email that “our legal team advised us not to speak to the media until the court hearing.”
Facebook said in a written statement that all of its fact checkers followed a “Code of Principles to promote fairness and nonpartisanship in fact checking.” Baybars Örsek, the head of the group that administers that code of principles, said he was conducting a “provisional assessment” of StopFake in light of the Zaborona report.
He said his organization, the International Fact Check Network, created by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida, takes reports of far-right ties seriously. He recognized that lack of partisanship had long been particularly difficult to determine during an armed conflict like that of Ukraine.
“They are working in a country where they are still practically at war with Russia,” Örsek said of StopFake. “This is a question we also struggle with as fact checkers: how do you conduct a nonpartisan fact check when there are tanks on the street?”
Many European countries struggle with far-right groups, but critics say they are over-tolerated in Ukraine because they share a common enemy with the country’s intellectual current: Russia. The notion that Ukraine has a far-right problem, in turn, is amplified and distorted by Russian state propaganda, which often falsely refers to Ukraine’s pro-western revolution in 2014 as a fascist coup.
Deadly fighting between the Ukrainian forces and the Russian-backed separatists continue to simmer in the east of the country. And propaganda has been a key tool for the Kremlin in its effort to keep Ukraine in Russia’s orbit for years.
The debate on the treatment of the extreme right reached a critical point after Zaborona published his article describing what he said was evidence of StopFake bias. The evidence included social media photos showing Marko Suprun, who hosts StopFake’s English video program on Russian disinformation, meeting two Ukrainian nationalist musicians at a meeting in 2017.
The songs of one of the musicians, Arseniy Bilodub, include “Heroes of the White Race” and, referring to the Holocaust, “Six Million Words of Lies”. Anton Shekhovtsov, an external professor at the University of Vienna who studies far-right movements in Europe, said in an interview that he did not see StopFake as a far-right organization, “but I don’t think they are non-partisan. “
StopFake replied that Zaborona was using “the guilt-by-association fallacy” by presenting the photographs as evidence of far-right connections by Mr. Suprun. Mr. Suprun did not respond to requests for comment.
“He was also photographed alongside Rabbi Yakov Bleich, but this does not make him a member of his synagogue,” StopFake said in a lengthy response to Zaborona’s article posted online. Mr. Suprun, the statement added, “is not involved in StopFake’s joint fact-checking project with Facebook.”
Ms. Sergatskova, editor of Zaborona, is originally from Russia and received Ukrainian citizenship in 2015. She was called a “left-handed FSB cast” by a leading Ukrainian journalist on Facebook, referring to the Russian spy agency, and other commentators posted her address. from Kiev before she hid
Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists called on the Ukrainian authorities to investigate the threats against Ms. Sergatskova. Ukrainian media organizations, including StopFake, signed an open letter condemning the threats. Ukrainian police did not respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Sergatskova said in a phone interview after hiding that her record as a freelance journalist has been distorted by critics who saw her playing at the hands of the Kremlin.
“The truth is a lie, freedom is slavery, it is a kind of Orwell story,” said Sergatskova. “By all appearances, we really, really touched a nerve.”
Ukrainian journalism students and faculty members launched StopFake in 2014 to counter Russian disinformation, receiving praise from Kiev civil society and western Ukraine supporters. StopFake’s agreement this year to sign as one of the two Facebook data verification partners in Ukraine gave it new leverage.
Facebook says it reduces the distribution of a post in users’ news if a third-party fact checker marks a post as bogus, but does not remove it. Maksym Skubenko, who heads Ukraine’s other Ukrainian fact-checking partner, VoxCheck, said users generally saw posts and articles marked as fake seconds after their team entered a fact check into Facebook’s system.
StopFake’s website shows that the organization has carried out some 200 Facebook post and article checks in Russian and Ukrainian since the group began working for the social network in April. Many of the fact controls are apolitical and related to the coronavirus pandemic. A smaller number address issues of Ukrainian national identity, usually when the item being verified conforms to a pro-Russian narrative.
In one case, StopFake contested claims by Facebook users that most Ukrainians celebrated the Soviet-era May 9 Victory Day holiday that marks the defeat of Nazi Germany. In another, StopFake verified an interview with a pro-Russian commentator bearing the headline “Ukraine is a Russian people.” When Facebook users try to share the article with the interview, they see a pop-up box titled “False information in this post.”
If users click “Publish Anyway,” the article appears dimmed on their profile with the words “False Information: Verified by Independent Fact Checkers,” with a link to StopFake. The original article quotes the commentator saying that there are “many Russian people” in Ukraine. StopFake’s fact check cites a survey in which 90 percent of Ukrainians describe their ethnicity as Ukrainian.
The idea that Ukrainians are Russians is often echoed in Russian disinformation, said Nina Jankowicz, a member of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, who recently published a book on Russian disinformation. But it is “also an opinion to which many Russians (and some Ukrainians themselves) subscribe.”
That leads to an unanswered question for Facebook. As Ms Jankowicz put it: “Should opinions be verified?”
Skubenko, who heads the other Ukrainian Facebook fact-checking partner, said he stayed away from national identity issues.
“In some cases, it is impossible to verify this in a factual manner,” he said. “Then you have to write that it is your personal opinion and not a fact check.”
StopFake journalists, like many Ukrainians, “are trying to find this compromise between liberal values and patriotic values,” said Volodymyr Yermolenko, a philosopher who publishes Ukraine World magazine. In doing so, he continued, StopFake seeks to break down a long history of Russian propaganda in Ukraine.
“It is a deconstruction of myths, in addition to factual verification,” he said.
Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kiev, Ukraine, and Davey Alba from New York.
