Guides · Updated 2026-10-28

Avoiding misinformation during a war

Every war produces a flood of claims, images and rumours. Some are honest mistakes made under pressure; others are deliberate attempts to mislead. You do not need special tools to protect yourself from most of it, only a few habits.

Common kinds of misleading content

• Old or unrelated footage presented as new, including clips from other wars, exercises, films and video games.
• Real images with false captions that change the place, the date or who is shown.
• Fabricated documents and screenshots of official letters, news sites or social media posts.
• Impersonated accounts of journalists, officials and news outlets, sometimes with a single changed letter in the name.
• AI-generated images, audio and video, which are increasingly realistic.
• True but selective information, such as one incident presented as a pattern.
• Fake fundraising that uses images of victims to collect money for unknown recipients.

Why it spreads

During a crisis people want answers quickly, and emotional content is shared more than careful content. Accounts that post first are rewarded with attention, even when they are wrong. Corrections rarely travel as far as the original claim, and people often remember the claim but not the correction.

Five habits that help

1. Pause before sharing anything that makes you very angry or afraid.
2. Check the source. Is it an outlet or person with a record, or an anonymous account created recently?
3. Look for a second, independent report. If only one account has the story, wait.
4. Check the date and place of images, using the steps in our verification guide.
5. Say what is unconfirmed. If you pass something on, say that it is not yet verified.

Tools that can help

Reverse image search in common search engines, the archived versions of web pages, and the fact-checking sections of established news outlets answer many questions in a few minutes. Fact-checking organisations that follow international codes of principles publish their methods and corrections, which makes their work easier to judge. No tool gives a final answer on its own; each one adds a piece of evidence that you weigh together with the others.

When you have shared something false

Everyone gets caught out sometimes. If you find that something you shared was false, delete it or reply to it with the correction, and tell the people you sent it to. A visible correction helps others more than a quiet deletion.

How this site handles it

We collect headlines from publisher feeds and news data services and name the outlet for every report. Events are shown in full only when at least two independent outlets report them; single-source reports appear faded and labelled “Unverified · 1 source”. We do not show who is said to be responsible for attacks or where attacks came from, because these claims are among the most frequently disputed. See our editorial policy.