It is very difficult to have a completely panoramic and exhaustive view, so it would be a little presumptuous on our part to pretend to quantify the false information with precision. But we can at least try to identify a trend.
In this magma of fabricated claims, photos and videos, misinformation is found at all levels, from state apparatuses to ordinary citizens, through foreign political supporters and militant Telegram groups. In view of the false information that we have already dealt with, it emanates from both camps, although in proportions and with means that are difficult to compare.
In Russia, a rhetoric that has been in place for years, based on a biased re-reading of history and many relays of influence in the West, both among opposition parties and in certain anti-globalization, anti-American or, more recently, antivax, which give this disinformation a more systematic, more organized character. For example, this false presenting Mr. Zelensky as a Nazi directly echoes Putin’s propaganda.
In Ukraine, the amplification of human dramas, disasters, the heroism of resistance, sometimes to the point of resorting to arrangements with the facts, and an international echo moved by emotion in the face of the Russian invasion and the fear of a third world war. Hence a misinformation that seems more organic. For example, many netizens heartily retweeted this image of a young girl arguing with a soldiernot realizing that it was a stock image of a Palestinian woman attacking an Israeli soldier.
It is also necessary to add to these two camps a peculiarity of the Internet: the presence of third parties who slip misleading content not to defend one country or another, but, either to capture the audience (this viral video in china from 2015 comes back every time), or just in a humorous way (the conspiracy for example took very seriously a montage of an American supposedly dead twice, in two different conflicts, without perceiving that it was a hoax featuring a popular youtuber among video game enthusiasts).
Disinformation in this conflict is therefore protean, and does not emanate from a single camp.