The war in Ukraine through the prism of visual disinformation and the limits of specialized fact-checking. A case study at Le Monde

Zecchinon, Pauline
(2024) ECREA 2024 Communication & social (dis)order 10th European Communication Conference — Location: Ljubljana (24.September.2024)

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led to a flood of disinformation circulating online. Two elements stand out: the nature of the false information disseminated (many visuals (Perrot, 2022) as well as its quantity, making fact-checking crucial for the coverage of the conflict. Based on a double framework of five semi-structured interviews coupled with an analysis of 48 debunks published between February and October 2022, this communication analyzes how Les Décodeurs, the fact-checking unit of the French daily newspaper Le Monde, responded to the flow of visual disinformation surrounding the conflict. We study 1) to what extent the specific context of disinformation surrounding the war in Ukraine led to new forms of visual disinformation and 2) how did fact-checkers select the content to verify and how did they conduct these verifications. These questions enable a better understanding of the discursive positions that specialized fact-checkers develop about the function of fact-checking in the context of the war and in the broader context stated by previous research. This study focuses on visual disinformation leveraging existing categories of disinformation (Tandoc et al., 2018; Wardle, 2018) while considering the visual dimension within a multimodal approach (Hameleers et al., 2020). The digitalization of news, combined with the rise of citizen journalism, or citizen witnessing (Allan, 2013), the democratization of photography (Ritchin, 2013) and the emergence of platforms on which to disseminate various forms of contents, has increased tenfold the means to contribute to the informational disorder. The huge number of visuals created daily leads journalists to make choices among the content to fact-check. Gatekeeping in journalism shifts from traditional fact-checking to retroactive “gatebouncing” due to online content creation and circulation (Vos, 2019 ; Singer, 2023). Verification practices face challenges in the continuous (dis)information flow, with image-based disinformation requiring a mix of automated and manual strategies (Thomson et al., 2022). Journalists sometimes lack standardized guidelines for verification, relying on traditional methods and external fact-checking teams (Brandtzaeg et al., 2016, Saldaña & Vu, 2022) Findings show that fact-checkers only debunk the most visible pieces of disinformation on social networks and these pieces focus on authentic images with misleading captions, rather than sophisticated manipulation. Therefore, previous categorizations still prove their ability to describe the 48 pieces of visual disinformation but we suggest a more refined approach by considering visual disinformation as mainly multimodal. The study uncovers the fact-checkers’role as gatekeepers filtering content gaining visibility through social networks and addressing the challenge of countering viral disinformation while avoiding unintended amplification. It also identifies a blend of shared and individual practices among fact-checking journalists. This includes both manual, pre-digital methods and more sophisticated tools. Finally, interviews reveal limitations in the performance of the gatebouncing function (Vos, 2019). Reconciling reactive and adaptative practices of fact-checking with mid and long-term editorial considerations in a rapidly evolving landscape leads to undiscussed, or “default choices”, while disinformation and propaganda about the war in Ukraine will more than likely not have died down by the fall of 2022.
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Zecchinon, P. (2024). The war in Ukraine through the prism of visual disinformation and the limits of specialized fact-checking. A case study at Le Monde. ECREA 2024 Communication & social (dis)order 10th European Communication Conference, Ljubljana. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/233355