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Across Ukraine, people have been cautiously holding phones up to the window, peaking past their curtains.
Grabbing a shot as the tanks roll past. Capturing the moment the night sky is lit bright by the explosion of an incoming missile.
Social media is flooded with videos that are documenting in real time what is happening as the Russian invasion draws on.
Many of the images circulating are real. And they are helping to inform the world what is happening.
But some are false or misleading. Some show footage from years ago, from different countries. Others have been deliberately manipulated.
This video claims to show a Ukrainian Air Force MiG-29 shooting down a Russian fighter jet.
It was posted on Twitter by eastern European media organisation Nexta TV the day after Russia announced its decision to invade Ukraine.
But if you take one of the video’s key frames, and pass it through a reverse image search, which analyses millions of images on the internet, you find this. A YouTube video posted on the same day.
YouTube does not provide the time videos were uploaded. But the first comment under the video was posted at around 5.30am GMT.
That’s the earliest evidence of this video appearing online, so it is likely to be the original.
The YouTube video, however, is caveated with a key piece of information omitted elsewhere: it’s from a video game called Digital Combat Simulator.
The clip has been viewed over 385,000 times through Nexta TV’s tweet alone.
But that’s not the only place it’s appeared online claiming to show an incident from the conflict in Ukraine – it was even shared by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence on Twitter and Facebook.
It’s not clear whether the account’s controller was aware of the nature of the video at the time of posting, but it illustrates how even official government accounts can play a role in spreading misinformation during periods of heightened uncertainty and conflict.
Sky News reported on this last year when an Israeli minister shared a video he said showed Hamas firing rockets during violence between Israeli and Palestinian groups. The video was actually several years old and had been filmed during the war in Syria.
And as the situation in Ukraine continues to deteriorate, we will likely see false or misleading content will continue to circulate.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
