# Technique T0023: Distort Facts * **Summary**: Change, twist, or exaggerate existing facts to construct a narrative that differs from reality. Examples: images and ideas can be distorted by being placed in an improper content * **Belongs to tactic stage**: TA06 | Incident | Descriptions given for this incident | | -------- | -------------------- | | [I00079 Three thousand fake tanks](../../generated_pages/incidents/I00079.md) | “On January 4 [2017], a little-known news site based in Donetsk, Ukraine published an article claiming that the United States was sending 3,600 tanks to Europe as part of “the NATO war preparation against Russia”.

“Like much fake news, this story started with a grain of truth: the US was about to reinforce its armored units in Europe. However, the article converted literally thousands of other vehicles — including hundreds of Humvees and trailers — into tanks, building the US force into something 20 times more powerful than it actually was.

“The story caught on online. Within three days it had been repeated by a dozen websites in the United States, Canada and Europe, and shared some 40,000 times. It was translated into Norwegian; quoted, unchallenged, by Russian state news agency RIA Novosti; and spread among Russian-language websites.

“It was also an obvious fake, as any Google news search would have revealed. Yet despite its evident falsehood, it spread widely, and not just in directly Kremlin-run media. Tracking the spread of this fake therefore shines a light on the wider question of how fake stories are dispersed.”

Russian state news agency RIA Novosti presents themselves as a news outlet (T0097.202: News Outlet Persona). RIO Novosti is a real news outlet (T0143.001: Authentic Persona), but it did not carry out a basic investigation into the veracity of the narrative they published implicitly expected of institutions presenting themselves as news outlets.

We can’t know how or why this narrative ended up being published by RIA Novosti, but we know that it presented a distorted reality as authentic information (T0023: Distort Facts), claiming that the US was sending 3,600 tanks, instead of 3,600 vehicles which included ~180 tanks. | | Counters | Response types | | -------- | -------------- | DO NOT EDIT ABOVE THIS LINE - PLEASE ADD NOTES BELOW