SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook has set up a special operations centre to monitor the conflict in Ukraine and has launched a feature so users in the country can lock their social media profiles for security.
Twitter posted tips on how users can secure their accounts against hacking, make sure their tweets are private and deactivate their accounts. The company tweeted the safety tips in English, Russian and Ukrainian. Social media platforms alluded to users in the country being at increased risk of their accounts being manipulated, a tactic Russia has used to spread disinformation for years.
Both social media platforms are often used by political activists and researchers to disseminate information during times of crisis. The Russian invasion of Ukraine also raised concerns about the spread of disinformation about the conflict on social media.
The recommendation ranged from what to do if your account was hacked to preemptively closing an account for safety concerns. Overall, the platforms encouraged users to be mindful of how they operated on the internet as they are at increased risk due to the conflict.
With one click, users in Ukraine can lock their profile to prevent users who are not their friends from downloading or sharing their profile picture, or seeing posts on their timeline, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security policy, said on Twitter. It also shared information on how users can deactivate their account.
Twitter posted a thread on avoiding manipulation and listing various methods how to do so. It offered tips and guides on “how to control your account and digital information,” first telling users to simply deactivate their accounts if they felt unsafe.
It explained what to do if an account had been hacked, how to know if it had been, and suggested not tweeting locations. It explained how to disable location tracking on a smartphone altogether.
As the conflict in Ukraine escalated.social media users took to platforms like TikTok, Snapchat and Twitter to post videos of evacuation lines, helicopters in the sky and anti-war protests in Russia. On short-form video app TikTok, the hashtags “Russia” and “Ukraine” had 37.2 billion and 8.5 billion views, respectively.
