Preface

Abstract

It could be you: who benefits from quick search, easy read and simple links to the Disinfo Dictionary

For whom?

The lexicon allows you to quickly search for and link to fakes that refute Russian narratives.

  • Journalists
  • Fact checkers
  • Disinformation activists
  • users of social networks
  • all citizens looking for reliable information about Russia and Ukraine

What?

This lexicon consolidates chronic lie narratives that have been refuted by several fact-checking organizations.

It is available in English and German. It can be read on the internet or downloaded as a PDF or epub, the latter can be read aloud by a screen-reader.

The encyclopedia is organized by subject area with one or more chapters with one or more sections.

The quality of the content is monitored by our partners, see in the appendix under Team & Partners.

Why?

A hallmark of propaganda is its ability to blur the lines between fact and fiction and confuse the distinction between truth and lies

Russia is making massive efforts to destroy our perception of reality. Russia spends billions to spread fake news, place and promote agents of influence, falsify websites, manipulate Wikipedia articles, and even create a completely manipulated version of Russian Wikipedia where articles related to the Russian war of aggression were replaced with targeted propaganda (Trokhymovych et al. (2025)):

In 2022, Russia created its own online encyclopedia Ruwiki, copying over 1.9 million articles from the Russian-language Wikipedia. Unlike the Russian-language branch of the volunteer and open Wikipedia Ruwiki content is controlled by “experts” who work during business hours, which indicates paid activity. The project is led by Volodymyr Medeyko, a former activist for the Russian-language Wikipedia. 1.75% of copied articles were changed, but they generated 14% of views. Russian editors remove facts about Russian war crimes, change the terminology (instead of “war” they write “combat operations”) and the geographical location of Ukrainian settlements, legalizing the occupation, rewrite the biographies of Ukrainian and Russian figures1

Quote from Dierickx and Lindén (2024) who have analyzed various challenges and contexts that fact checkers face. We have also extended this to citizens fighting disinformation:

  • Knowing or finding the facts
  • Know or recognize sources and patterns of propaganda
  • decipher the truth in any specific context
  • find the truth quickly
  • quickly refute the lies (late arriving comments lack visibility)2
  • Scaling rectification to the industrial scale of disinformation dissemination
  • Scaling rectification and outreach against algorithmic bias or even censorship on social networks
  • Scaling rectification across different social networks despite proprietary content management

How?

The Disinformation Dictionary addresses these challenges somewhat by

  • providing curated truths in the context of the russian war in Ukraine
  • teaching about propaganda patterns
  • linking to officially diagnosed and debunked disinfo at EUvsDisinfo
  • finding truth fast via keyword navigation and search function
  • debunking the lies fast by linking or copy-pasting the truths
  • fast implies higher throughput and therefore better scaling3
  • (against algorithmic biases only regulation helps, that enforces transparency and fairness)
  • works uniformly in all social networks4

  1. Inna Hadzynska and Bohdana Bakay and Nadya Kelm (3.7.2025). Russians are writing their own encyclopedia: Ruwiki, from which they are crossing out war. texty.org. https://texty.org.ua/articles/115275/klon-vikipediyi-na-sluzhbi-propahandy-yak-ruviki-perepysuye-realnist-dlya-rosiyan/↩︎

  2. NAFO solves this by posting graphic memes, which is very quick but can be more easily defamed as non-fact-based. Using memes tends to escalate and prolong discussions and tie up capacity; providing facts tends to silence trolls↩︎

  3. although disinfo scaling is much cheaper unless regulation enforces algorithmic countermeasures↩︎

  4. except for algorithmic dampening of reach when using external links↩︎