From CJR’s The Media Today by Jon Allsop:
TWO DAYS AGO, Russian forces bombed a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, killing at least three people, one of them a child, and trapping others under the rubble. Yesterday, the Twitter account of Russia’s embassy in the UK claimed that photos showing victims of the attack actually depicted actors, including a popular Ukrainian beauty blogger, with fake injuries—a textbook example of the “crisis actor” conspiracy that will be familiar to followers of far-right discourse in the US. Russian state media and government officials amplified similar claims, though other officials, confusingly, said that the facts weren’t clear yet. Twitter eventually took down the embassy’s tweet, citing a violation of its policies around the denial of violent events. Facebook took similar action against a post on its platform.