Claims that atrocities in Gaza and Ukraine are ‘staged’ is another dangerous social media theory

The image sticks in the mind. A young woman, her heavily pregnant belly heaving, as she is carried on a stretcher away from a blasted-out building.

The photograph was captured by Ukrainian journalist Evgeniy Maloletka outside Maternity Hospital No 3 in Mariupol on March 9th 2022, in the aftermath of its bombing in a Russian air strike.

It was published by the Associated Press and quickly went viral, undercutting Russian claims that they were only hitting military targets.

In a bid to contain the damage, Russian officials began to dismiss the photographs as fake.

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In remarks that can still be read on Russia’s state-owned news agency Tass, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations Dmitry Polyansky told a UN session that the woman in the photograph was a “female model, who impersonates three different pregnant women” in the set of images, wearing “different disguises and different make-up”. Russia’s embassy in Britain published a Tweet branding the photograph as “fake”.

These claims were spread widely online. But they were false. The woman in the picture had a name. She was called Iryna Kalinina, she was 32, and the photographs show some of her final hours alive.

She and her husband Ivan had been trying for a baby for years, he told later interviews with the BBC and the New York Times. When the invasion began on February 24th, the couple tried to evacuate from the besieged city, but turned back when the cars ahead were shot at.

With medical facilities closing down around them, on March 8th they decided to relocate to Maternity Hospital No. 3. Iryna’s due date was March 11th. Ivan had gone out to buy nappies and baby clothes when the bomb landed.

Oleksandr Bilash, an anaesthesiologist, was one of the medical team who performed an emergency Caesarean on Iryna. She had wounds to her hip and stomach, he recalled to Ukrainian journalist Angelina Kariakina. “We could see these wounds were incompatible with life.”

The baby was stillborn: a little boy that his parents had planned to call Miron, after the Russian word for peace. Ivan buried him together with his mother.

In the time that has passed, the smearing of genuine victims of atrocities as actors or hoaxers has only become more prevalent.

Following the Hamas attacks on October 7th and Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza, accusations that war zone footage is faked by actors has reached new heights of prevalence online.

The BBC disinformation correspondent Marianna Spring recently reported the case of two four-year-old boys, called Omar and Omer, who were both killed in the early days of the war.

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In Israel, Omer was killed when his home was attacked by Hamas on October 7th, along with his parents and two big sisters.

In Gaza, Omar was killed when he was playing outside with his brother and an Israeli air strike hit a neighbouring building.

They had lived their short lives just 23 kilometres apart.

After their deaths, strangers online claimed they were not real people. Pro-Israeli accounts declared that a video that showed Omar’s body wrapped in a white blanket was Hamas propaganda that showed “a doll”, in claims that were amplified by official Israeli state accounts.

When news of the death of Omer and his family was posted online, accounts across social media sites insisted that they were “crisis actors” and that this was false propaganda, because Hamas had not killed children.

There are new examples of such misinformation almost every day the war continues. Israeli official accounts use a nickname, “Pallywood”, which they use to describe a supposed industry of false footage of Palestinian deaths.

In just one example, the spokesman for prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Ofir Gendelman, has posted behind-the-scenes footage of a Lebanese film, claiming that this demonstrates “how they fake injuries” for the cameras.

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The notion that powerful actors stage “false flag” attacks to manipulate events has a long history in conspiracist circles, going back to the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The newer idea of “crisis actors” – that victims in emergencies are performers – rose in popularity as a way to dismiss mass shooting incidents.

It seems to have broken out of the conspiracy theory world to reach a new level of popularity just as society adjusts to a new level of exposure to the granular details of war.

Any social media user is now at risk of unintentionally seeing dead children or live-streamed footage of people being slaughtered in their homes.

I wonder whether thinking that atrocities are staged has become attractive because people don’t want to believe it’s real.