Especially in wartime, all sorts of false claims get made, and those claims were widely disseminated on giant tech platforms. The “Ghost of Kyiv” story sent out by Ukraine’s official social media channels about a brave Ukrainian pilot supposedly shooting down 10 Russian jets last month logged millions of shares on Twitter and Facebook, even though it’s obviously fake, having been built around stock images, a sequence from a video game and a Photoshopped headshot of a lawyer from Buenos Aires.

On the other side, Google’s brother YouTube hosted Russian propaganda videos claiming the terrified Ukrainians were begging Mother Russia to come and save them. One researcher estimated 115,000 sock puppets were spreading propaganda about Russia on Twitter and Facebook, and the number of such accounts skyrocketed 11,000% in mid-February as Putin prepared the invasion.

When you set out to determine what is true and false for billions of eyeballs, you might as well try to control the wind. And it is supreme arrogance for the censors and algorithm-fiddlers of Google, Facebook and Twitter to decide that they and their armies of 24-year-old content managers are graced with the wisdom to sort out what’s accurate, especially when perceptions of truth so often depend on the question, “Which side are you on?”