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The creative use of technology in the service of Ukraine

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The creative use of technology in the service of Ukraine

Counteract Russian propaganda, send money quickly to Ukrainians who are resisting under the bombs, let those who are strangers identify with the tragedy of the conflict through virtual and augmented reality. These are some of the ways in which software, applications and online platforms can be used to express solidarity with the Ukrainian population under attack and provide concrete help.

Very often it is about using these products creatively, going well beyond the purpose for which they were designed. To send money to Ukrainians, for example, thousands of people from all over the world are using AirBnb’s booking system.

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Solidarity bookings

The idea is simple and effective: you book one or more nights and pay the bill, obviously without using the accommodation. In just over 24 hours, the American company sends the money to the hosts, the owners of the apartments or rooms for rent. In just two days, last Wednesday and Thursday 61,000 nights were booked in Ukraine, for a total gross income of approximately two million dollars. In addition to money, users send messages of solidarity. “It’s not just the money, it’s the support and encouragement – host Ekaterina Martiusheva told the American broadcaster NPR – we receive these messages from people who call us brave, and it’s fantastic”. But be careful that someone does not take advantage of it.

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“If I were a Russian scammer, I would create fake AirBnbs in Kiev and Odessa as quickly as possible to make cash using these noble intentions”, he tweeted for example Simon Calder, a travel journalist. This is why it is important to check when the host’s AirBnb account was registered (if too recent is not a good sign) the date of the announcement and user reviews. Still on the financial aid front, other platforms such as Uber and Etsy are meeting Ukrainian citizens in different ways. Uber, to help refugees fleeing the conflict, is offering free rides from the Ukrainian-Polish border to the cities of Lublin in central Poland and Rzeszow in the southeast. Uber users in Polish border towns can also enter special codes to get a free ride to or from checkpoints.

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For the Ukrainian sellers of its online store, Etsy has taken steps to cancel all transaction and brokerage fees, with total savings that the company says is around four million dollars.

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Pierce the censorship

On the counter-information front, Italian Tech has already told how the space for reviews of clubs and restaurants on Google Maps has been used by thousands of people to try to counter the truths of convenience of Russian censorship with more reliable information on what is happening in Ukraine. Something similar happened on Tripadvisor. But last Thursday, Google announced that it had blocked the possibility of posting reviews in Ukraine, Russia and Belarussia, to prevent it from being used in ways that are contrary to the rules.

There remain other ways to bypass censorship. One of those that seems to have had the most success so far is experimenting with the Ukrainian app Reface. It was conceived for entertainment: it allows you to digitally superimpose your own face on that of celebrities – however, circumstances have transformed it into a counter-information tool. It is aimed above all at Russian users, as many as five million, who are sent notifications with short videos of the situation on the ground and messages inviting protest. In the first few days, Reface sent over two million notifications. But it didn’t stop there. He customized the app icon with the Ukrainian flag, introduced a support message in the welcome screen and automatically applied a watermark that reads “StandWithUkraine” to all images. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been added to the gallery of celebrities, a figure with whom it has become easy for many users, not just Ukrainians, to identify.

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Hacking the advertisements

Will it help? It’s hard to say, but these days everyone is literally using the weapons he has. “Being united is the most important thing. And useful – Ksenia Maslova of Reface told The Verge – we have our own little battlefield ”. It is the same spirit that animates a group of activists who are trying to exploit programmatic advertising systems on various Russian sites to convey messages of solidarity and information. Led by London-based marketing expert Rob Blackie, they launched a crowdfunding campaign to be able to buy the advertising space. As of March 3, the announcements they had reached more than two million people, 42,000 of whom had clicked on them. Since then it has been a constant cat and mouse chase with Russian censors, with thousands of ads banned, but the initiative continues.

Programmatic advertising (or programmatic advertising) is the one that allows you to automatically send messages targeted by type of audience and keywords, sending the same content simultaneously on thousands of sites that host the banners of a certain circuit. It doesn’t always work well. Sometimes certain sites end up hosting images and videos that have little to do with content, with embarrassing effects. With special techniques it is possible to exploit these system errors in your favor, and this is what Blackie, together with a group of about twenty volunteers, is doing.

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Raise awareness and shake consciences

It is a drop of the sea. Many users use ad blockers, so they will not see the ads and, indoctrinated by years of propaganda, it is not certain that even if they clicked on the link they would believe what they see. But every little trick can help. How’s that devised by a web design agency in Berlin, New Now. A small script, a piece of code that loaded on any one warns with a message whoever connects from a Russian address that Putin’s government is lying to him and that innocent people are dying in Ukraine. The aim, of course, is to raise awareness and shake consciences.

Something similar happens in the world of video games. Polish developer 11 Bit is donating all profits from sales of the This War of Mine video game to the Ukrainian Red Cross relief operations. This War of Mine, based on the siege of Sarajevo, tells the war not from the point of view of the soldiers, but of the civilians who suffer the damage. In the early days of the war, sales rose 2,500 percent and profits reached $ 715,000, all of which went to charity.

Inside the nightmare of war, in virtual reality

Other developers point to virtual and augmented reality as a means of generating empathy. More than real games, these are simulators, immersive documentaries. Titles like Aftermath VR: Euromaidan on the 2014 Ukrainian revolution that deposed the corrupt pro-Russian president; or PrisonersVoice, which recreates in augmented reality the story of three Ukrainian activists imprisoned for five years by the Russians after the annexation of Crimea. To make those living abroad understand what it means to fall victim to the prison system and the Kremlin’s repression; something that, unfortunately, many in Ukraine are likely to experience shortly in real life.

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