Putin ‘weaponises Facebook in bid to win propaganda war’ over Ukraine

PUTIN has “weaponised” Facebook in a bid to win the propaganda war over Ukraine, it was claimed last night.

Kremlin-owned media outlets have blitzed it with disinformation — such as Ukraine planned a “false flag” incident “prepared by British-trained saboteurs”.

Research by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate shows that in the last year, the posts got 500,000 likes, comments and shares.

But 91 per cent had no warning label despite a 2019 pledge to fight disinformation by boss Mark Zuckerberg.

CCDH chief Imran Ahmed said: “Facebook has once again fallen short on its promise to enforce its own rules.

“The justification for the Russian war against Ukraine was built on Facebook.

“It is time Mark Zuckerberg stopped allowing his platform to be used by hostile actors with malignant intentions.

“His failure to stop Facebook being weaponised by the Russian state is being felt right now by the people of Ukraine and, given the bellicose words of the Russian leader, cast the spectre of a nuclear mushroom cloud over the world.”

A Facebook spokesman said: “This is a wildly inaccurate statement that’s designed to mislead people about the scale of state-controlled media on Facebook.

“In fact 70 per cent of the posts had 10 or fewer interactions, and the 500,000 interactions overall represent just 0.07 per cent of the over 700 million interactions on English public content about Ukraine or Russia from Pages and public groups over the same time period.

“We recently announced we are prohibiting ads from Russian state media and demonetizing their accounts.

“We’re also continuing to work with third-party fact checkers to debunk false claims in the region and labeling content by Russian state owned media organizations in defiance of Russian authorities’ orders.”