TRUTH DECAY‘Ukraine Biolabs’: How Attempts to Debunk a Conspiracy Theory Only Helped It Spread
As Russian forces moved into Ukraine on 24 February, stories of U.S.-funded biolabs and bioweapon research in Ukraine began to spread on social media. The false claims spread from right-wing circles but became more wide-spread, and were soon picked up by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. It wasn’t long until the Russian government, which had spread tales of Ukrainian biolabs in the past, adopted the narrative as a belated justification for the invasion. But, ironically, the very effort to debunk the Russian propaganda promoted by Carlson and Russia only gave to story more oxygen.
On February 24, as Russian forces began their invasion, stories of US-funded biolabs and bioweapon research in Ukraine began to spread on social media.
The false claims spread from right-wing circles but became more widespread, and were soon picked up by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. It wasn’t long until the Russian government, which had spread tales of Ukrainian biolabs in the past, adopted the narrative as a belated justification for the invasion.
We studied how the biolabs narrative was amplified on Twitter, and made an unsettling (if not entirely surprising) discovery. Most of those responsible for sending the story viral were trying to debunk it, but only ended up giving it more oxygen.
Debunking Gone Wrong
We initially set out to look for coordinated groups of conspiracy theorists promoting the bioweapons theory.
To do this, we searched for Twitter accounts that retweeted posts mentioning both Ukraine and biolabs. Then, to see how these accounts were connected to each other, we looked at whether any two accounts retweeted the same thing at the same time. We found 1,469 such accounts, and 26,850 links between them.
In the visualization of our results below, each dot is an account that retweeted at least one post about Ukraine biolabs. When two accounts retweeted the same thing within a minute of each other on more than one occasion, we draw a line between them.
You can see the accounts are split up into clusters of coordinated retweeting behavior. We found 50 such clusters, and 49 of them were trying to debunk the bioweapon theory. Only one small group was trying to spread it.
Within other large clusters in this network we saw tweets from accounts working to debunk the bioweapon conspiracy, such as White House press secretary Jen Psaki, the Pentagon, the Kyiv Independent, and Sky News.
Our analysis concludes that those most prominent in spreading the narrative were those trying to debunk it. Most of the clusters were retweeting Psaki.
Disinformation for Everyone
One place to start understanding what’s going on is with the American scholar Kate Starbird’s idea of “participatory disinformation”.
This process often starts with highly visible users (like politicians, celebrities, or opinion leaders) disseminating news to their online audiences.
