The young Ukrainians battling pro-Russian trolls
What's it like being a young Ukrainian experiencing war while wading through chaos and misinformation on social media?
24-year-old Katrin awoke in Kyiv last Thursday to the sound of an explosion - and soon enough found her social media feed awash with distressing posts.
"The first thing we had to do was to pack and go to the basement," she tells me, now safe in her small hometown outside of Lviv where she escaped with her boyfriend, neighbours and their dogs.
"But right after we went down, I started scrolling Instagram. And it was all on my Instagram stories and my posts."
She wasn't just seeing scary, factual posts from friends, but false information - including comments on TikTok from accounts that claimed the war "wasn't real" or that it was a "hoax".
"After I blocked this one account, another sprung up with a profile picture of a different girl, writing to me in Russian," Katrin says.
The trolls have been prolific - and they have been interacting with young women across Ukraine.
Rumours on Telegram
Alina, 18, found herself in a total panic after seeing posts in Russian suggesting that her neighbourhood in Zaporizhzhya in south-east Ukraine was about to be shelled and destroyed. But the rumours were false.
Alina spoke to me from her bedroom, exhausted after nights of air raids and sheltering. She says that rumours moved rapidly on chat app Telegram, spread by people apparently setting out to cause panic.
"Russians specifically find our chats and write that something is exploding. Someone writes that there is a sign of a bomb in the area - then others refute the information," she says.
Another video she saw on Telegram suggested there had been an explosion at the airport in her hometown. It turned out to be a different explosion, in the nearby city of Mariupol.
Old footage from other conflicts, including the massive blast in Beirut in 2020, has also been shared widely - including on TikTok, where clips have racked up millions of views.
Marta is 20 years old and was stuck in the UK where she was visiting friends when the war broke out. She says she's seen videos from Syria and Iraq.
"But they posted them as 'Ukraine'," she says.
She says videos on TikTok's For You Page - the main gateway into the video-sharing app - have left her terrified and angry, as she desperately worries for friends and family back home.
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