Under the Fire of Disinformation. Attitudes Towards Fake News in the Ukrainian Frozen War

Abstract

In this article, we examine individual attitudes towards fake news in the extreme conditions of a propaganda war, taking into account the complex regional social and historical conditions. For this purpose, within the mobile boundary zone during frozen war in Ukraine, we conducted qualitative research among representatives of generations X and Z (high school teachers and students). Being accustomed to fake news turned out to be common for our interlocutors, whereas the main generational differences regarded the perception of the primary sources of fake news and trust in the media, and, first and foremost, the ways of verifying information, where we demonstrated unique strategies of behavior, such as ignoring fake news (1) and relying on official websites (2), which were accompanied by the common for “normal” conditions checking information in other Internet sources (3) and the verification information from other users (4).