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The Russian invasion of Ukraine that began Feb. 24 is a devastating situation that has heavily impacted the invaded country, leaving millions of Ukrainians displaced as their hometowns and cities are destroyed by the unrelenting Russian missile strikes. 

With any world conflict that creates such negative, violent consequences as these, there is often an influx of activist efforts from people around the globe who wish to offer aid to the affected people. 

While global activism would seem to be an innately positive social construct that inherently rids itself of any negative consequences by the way it exists solely to combat such crises, in this digital age, the channels through which activism flows have become almost solely composed of social media platforms — platforms that often warp the benevolent goals of movements.

The activist efforts forming around the Russia-Ukraine War are no different, and it needs to be addressed, mitigated and eventually changed.

Given that social media, especially as of late, has a rampant history of misinformation posts and given that these posts can reach millions of users due to their implicitly viral nature, one can see how modern activist efforts can become trapped in a fallacious loop. 

To reach as many people as possible, social media platforms must be used to spread the word about issues, yet because the information is being spread via social media, facts are subject to being altered and stretched by the infinitely cascading tiers of users that re-share content to their own pages. 

“The conflict in Ukraine is a perfect moment for us as a society to reassess the ways we try to engage with activism and an opportunity for us to phase out the Instagram-story activism that dominates the current sociocultural landscape.”

“We talk a lot in classes about how impactful misinformation can be on social media (because) it’s just something that is so, so hard to pick out from the real resources that are on these sites,” said Trey Brown, a senior at Colorado State University studying English.

The moment an activist movement appears on a social media platform, it is immediately thrust into the thresher, able to be manipulated to fit anyone’s subjective opinions or twisted by poorly researched, semi-factual “news” articles.

This can be seen occurring on social media in real time, as a recent trend by pro-Russia protesters is using the guise of fact-checking to damage Ukrainian credibility. This trend focuses on separatist figureheads discrediting Ukrainian media outlets by using footage of drone strikes or other crises with claims that the videos were spread with false context meant to demonize Russian forces. 

“It just sucks because there’s actually a lot of good, informative content that is on social media, but it just gets tainted by all the lies to the point where I feel like I can’t really trust anything I see (or) the fundraising and activist stuff because I don’t know if it’s really going to help the people or if it’s a performance,” Brown said.

The conflict in Ukraine is a perfect moment for us as a society to reassess the ways we try to engage with activism and an opportunity for us to phase out the Instagram-story activism that dominates the current sociocultural landscape. 

This is clearly a flawed structure, and if all those engaged in activism were to use different platforms or provide ample evidence and support for their social media campaigns, misinformation could be more easily nullified, and we could get to the point where helping those in need doesn’t require sifting through lies.

Reach JD Meltzner at letters@collegian.com or on Twitter @jd_meltzner.