- Instagram users are making ad money from Ukraine war footage, much of which is fake, Input.com reported.
- The accounts often start out as meme pages, or falsely claim to be run by journalists.
- The accounts have the potential to widely spread misinformation long-term, experts say.
On Thursday, just hours after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, the Instagram account @liveinafganistan, which had 218,000 followers, turned to @livefromukraine.
It's not a news outlet. Instead, it's part of a group of similar accounts that have found a way to profit from the violence in Ukraine: Instagram 'war accounts.'
As first reported Friday by Taylor Lorenz for Input.com, accounts like @pov.warfare, @waraholics, @military_footage, and @livefromukraine can rack up hundreds of thousands of followers, and disseminate misinformation to people on Instagram.
They often start out as meme pages, purporting to share footage of battleground military action in Ukraine, and some, Lorenz found, are falsely claiming to be run by journalists.
"They are misinforming the public on a subject about which little information is anyway available," Saif Shahin, a Tilburg University professor who researches digital media and culture, told Insider.
And they're monetizing the footage with some accounts posting advertisements on their stories or feeds, often for OnlyFans creators.
"What I'm trying to do is get as many followers as possible by using my platform and skills," the administrator for @livefromukraine and @POVwarfare, who calls himself Hayden, told Lorenz.
Hayden said his strategy was posting whatever he needed to in order to go viral, previously publishing "vaguely conservative-leaning videos featuring people shoplifting," as well as clips of President Joe Biden, for instance.
Hayden's followers commented that some videos are completely inaccurate and misrepresentative: he posted one video yesterday that wasn't even of Ukraine, Lorenz reported, although it claimed to be, and he did not take it down.
"No one even knows what's going on," Hayden told Lorenz. "They believe anything that's put in front of them. I'm putting up what I believe is accurate, and they can draw an opinion based on that."
As of Friday afternoon, Hayden's account @livefromukraine appears to have been deleted.
Fake fundraisers, OnlyFans ads, and misinformation
Some of these war accounts started out as meme pages, reflected in the strategies their creators use to draw followers.
Owners of accounts like @livefromukraine set their pages to private, meaning that potential followers need to request to join, a well-documented practice that meme pages use so that people will have forgotten why they followed in the first place — something that translates to a large audience.
"The more people follow such accounts, the more legitimate they appear, which in turn would draw more followers to such accounts," Shahin said. "The harm they do thus multiplies."
In addition to selling ads to OnlyFans creators, some war accounts are sharing footage of the military invasion along with fundraisers for supposed relief efforts. One account, Lorenz said, called @PlantATreeCo, previously claimed that it would plant trees for every new follower, but there was no proof it actually did so. On Thursday, it posted another fundraiser for Ukraine relief, which Instagram eventually removed.
"These posts do so well because Ukraine is a super hot topic right now, and there's shock value in videos of an airstrike," says Rowan Winch, the 17-year-old chief social officer of Fallen Media, a meme-focused content studio, told Lorenz.
This type of misinformation is growing rampant across multiple platforms. On TikTok, for instance, a video of a parachuting soldier racked up more than 20 million views this week, NBC News' Kat Tenbarge and Ben Collins reported, but the video was from a training exercise, first posted to an Instagram account by a user with the same username on April 6, 2016. NBC writes that other users are also pretending to be in Ukraine, using doctored or dubbed footage of other countries in an attempt to gain followers and donations.
"Many people who begin to follow such accounts to get news about the war would continue to follow them even after the war is over, which means they would be fed with misinformation even about other subjects over an extended period," Shahin said.
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