BBC: Paid Twitter Accounts Promote Ukraine Fake News

The BBC reports:

One viral post last week focused on US military aid to Ukraine. It featured a screenshot of what appeared to be a headline from a news website, along with an image of two rifles. “French police are fired upon with American rifles that may have come from Ukraine,” reads the headline. The image used in the post appears in a Russian military blog from 2012 about a shooting competition held on a firing range near Moscow.

Several Twitter accounts with a blue tick have recently promoted a claim that Russia has discovered “baby factories” in Ukraine. BBC Verify has traced the origin of the claim to an article published in March by The People’s Voice, an alternative name for YourNewsWire, which has been described by fact-checking organisations as one of the biggest producers of fake news on the internet.

Read the full article. The fake stories have gotten millions of views. As I reported back in 2018, YourNewsWire is the work of a homocon couple. That year their site claimed that Israel had nuked Syria and that the flu vaccine was causing a flu epidemic.

We’ve examined some of the most widely shared false and misleading tweets about the war in Ukraine in recent weeks, all posted by Twitter Blue subscribers whose content is promoted by the platform.https://t.co/JhuRkTpmja

— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) July 9, 2023

Hollywood’s hidden alt-media agitators may be the new Breitbart https://t.co/65Q4CF4JGA pic.twitter.com/ShRfFTzHZ5

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) September 21, 2017