Despite the potential of visual disinformation to deceive people on pressing socio-political issues, we currently lack an understanding of how online visual disinformation (de)legitimizes partisan truth claims at times of war. As an important next step in disinformation theory and research, this article inductively mapped a wide variety of global visual disinformation narratives on armed conflicts disseminated via social media. The narratives were sampled through various international fact-checking databases, involving multiple social media platforms and countries. The analyses reveal that visual disinformation mainly consisted of existing footage that was decontextualized in a deceptive manner based on time, location, or fictionality. Moving beyond existing research exploring how decontextualized visuals offer proof for counter-factual narratives, our findings indicate that visuals contribute to the process of othering by constructing a “delusional rationality” that legitimizes mass violence and the destruction of the other. These findings have crucial ramifications for international policy and interventions at times of global armed conflicts that are covered widely across social media channels.

中文翻译：

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信息战的视觉本质：在乌克兰和以色列/巴勒斯坦战争的背景下对真相和证据的党派主张的构建


尽管视觉虚假信息有可能在紧迫的社会政治问题上欺骗人们，但我们目前缺乏对在线视觉虚假信息如何在战争时期（去）合法化党派真理主张的理解。作为虚假信息理论和研究的重要下一步，本文归纳性地绘制了通过社交媒体传播的关于武装冲突的各种全球视觉虚假信息叙述。这些叙述是通过各种国际事实核查数据库进行的采样，涉及多个社交媒体平台和国家。分析表明，视觉虚假信息主要由现有镜头组成，这些镜头根据时间、地点或虚构性以欺骗性方式去语境化。超越现有的研究探索去语境化的视觉如何为反事实叙事提供证据，我们的研究结果表明，视觉通过构建一种“妄想理性”来促进他者化的过程，使大规模暴力和对他人的破坏合法化。这些发现对全球武装冲突期间的国际政策和干预具有重要影响，这些冲突在社交媒体渠道中被广泛报道。