Arm III, a video game that can look quite realistic under the right circumstancesHas a long history of appearing on news programs and being either mixed up or used intentionally in place of actual camera footage of real events. This trend continues in the current crisis in Ukraine.
as Bloomberg reportSome of today’s most viewed videos on Facebook’s gaming channel were a series of clips purporting to show military action in Ukraine that were “viewed by more than 110,000 people and shared more than 25,000 times” before being removed from Facebook became .
The same videos are also circulating on other social media, including Twitter; Here is one of the clips with the text “Ukraine fires missiles to intercept Russian planes‘s artillery fire”, although there really are quite a few Weapon III Recordings:
TO UPDATE: Twitter has now removed both the video and the tweet itselfalthough you can see the footage in question below:
At the time of publication, this tweet has 11,000 likes and almost 2000 retweets. It’s easy for you and me to sit here and say, “Well, of course this is a video game,” but not everyone is familiar with it ArmAs Attention to detail and visual fidelity. And remember, the smaller/blurrier these social media videos get, the easier it is to pass them off as real footage.
This also speaks to a broader problem that anyone who’s been online in the last 24 hours (or 10 years) will have seen: any coverage of the invasion that allows community contributions is crammed with opportunists looking to Seeking engagement (no matter how inaccurate the content they actually share) and agents trying to confuse and distract attention from what they are sharing actually
It makes it difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not by watching this stuff online, which is why sites like Facebook (see below) try to actually do something proactive and real-time for once using people trying and moderating:
As I said, this is not the first time Arm III Footage has been misused in times of crisis. Russian news outlets were caught using it for a story about Syria in 2018 and tried to pass it off as a “human error”.although Russia’s use of video game footage in 2017 to claim the US was supporting ISIS didn’t help their case.
Use this as a reminder that when you look at things about Ukraine on social media, Check sources and content before engaging and/or sharing.
