Arma 3 clips masquerading as footage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine amassed more than 110,000 views before being removed
Arma 3, Bohemia Interactive's milsim sandbox, isn't a game I see very often these days, except when it crops up in the news because someone's trying to pass off game footage as part of a real conflict. It happens surprisingly often, like when an Indian news channel used it to claim Pakistan bombed Afghanistan in 2021. And it's happened again, this time masquerading as footage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Spotted by Bloomberg (via Kotaku), Facebook users were shown clips claiming to be from the invasion, including one that was presented as a Russian air assault. Arma 3 launched more than eight years ago, boasting an impressive level of fidelity at the time, but not so much that you'd mistake it for a real conflict under normal circumstances. In a low-quality social media clip, though, these completely fictional digital brawls can look startlingly real.
These clips were viewed on Facebook Gaming, which should have been a red flag, but they were presented as real videos of the conflict, some even sporting 'Breaking News' banners. Bloomberg reports that, before Facebook took them down, more than 110,000 people had viewed them, sharing them 25,000 times. On Twitter, meanwhile, a tweet sharing them got 11,000 likes and 2,000 retweets before Twitter removed it.
It's not clear what the uploader's objective was, but modern conflicts are full of disinformation and propaganda that spread like wildfire across social media, where the desire for engagement and the need to share absolutely everything trumps fact-checking.
The problem is serious enough that Facebook, which has previously taken a troublingly hands-off approach to dealing with disinformation, is actually taking sensible action. A «Special Operations Center» has
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