The Ukraine Conflict Is Not Your Chance To Go Viral

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Returning to pop culture references, many on Twitter created memes showing Zelensky photoshopped as various Marvel characters, including Captain America. Some people have decided that he resembles the actor Jeremy Renner, who played Hawkeye in the Marvel movies, and has “played” the actor in the role of Zelensky in … I guess … a war movie? “Fans cast Jeremy Renner as Zelensky in Ukraine invasion fantasy film: Too soon?” the New York Post headline read. “Fans…. what…….,” one person said the answer.

Sellers on Etsy are even getting in on the action. On the platform, you can buy a mug with Zelensky’s face on them surrounded by the colors of the Ukrainian flag, a T-shirt with a quote from the president in floral script, another with Zelensky’s face on the famous Barack Obama “Hope” logo, or that reads ” President Zelenskyy, my hero.” Have we learned anything from the doomed “Cuomosexual” meme? No politician needs this level of passion and thirst online, and Zelensky has enough on his plate. “Not sure twitter will survive a milkshake duck of this magnitude,” one person wrote respond to hero worship.

On TikTok, the situation is no better. As NPR reported over the weekend, the platform has been flooded with videos allegedly from the front lines of the conflict that actually show footage of “old conflicts, scenes from movies and even video game battles as if showing live footage on the ground.”

Media Matters even called out TikTok for “facilitating” the spread of misinformation, writing, “Videos of missile strikes, explosions, and gunfire exchanges have garnered millions of views, although some contain old footage unrelated to this conflict or videos manipulated through audio to the benefit of an anxious audience.”

It blames one of the app’s main features, the ability to reuse other people’s audio, as a “major source of digital misinformation,” because it allows people to upload new fake videos using old audio. One of the videos called Media Matters, which is said to be from Ukraine and has more than 5 million views, uses audio from a clip of the 2020 explosion in Beirut.

“The architecture of the TikTok platform fuels fear and allows misinformation to flourish in times of anxiety,” the watchdog wrote. “While it is important that the public remains aware of high-risk situations, the design of the platform does not meet current needs.”



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