n Wednesday, Reface, a face-swap app built by three young Ukrainian entrepreneurs, expects to debut a new app that makes it easy to create and share war-related visual memes. Ukrainians will be the first to receive the new app, called Memomet, which the founders hope will both help fight the information war and also make coping during the Russian assault on Ukraine a little easier.
On its own, Memomet is the tiniest thing. But across Ukraine, where technology companies proliferated before the war and where the fast-growing population of IT workers swelled to 250,000, such small efforts, done solo or in conjunction with the country’s volunteer “IT Army,” add up. They’re especially helpful for optics in the ongoing information war and for organizing humanitarian funds and help.
But for most tech companies and IT workers, fighting back is about creating apps, posting videos and information on social media, increasing awareness among American and European customers and raising money. Groups of volunteer civilians have self-organized with overlapping members and goals. “If you are doing something that helps people and uses technology, you can say you are in the IT army,” says Denys Zhadanov, a board member of Readdle . “It’s very decentralized and chaotic.
use social media to reach rank-and-file Russian citizens in the early days, undermining Russian government propaganda and spreading word of the devastation caused by Valdimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.