Some have falsely claimed that the Ukrainian president did so in retaliation against Trump’s recent tirade against him.
The internet is awash with false claims that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has banned Truth Social, the social media platform owned by US President Donald Trump.
Images have appeared on other social networks such as X, purportedly showing screengrabs of users unable to access Truth Social in Ukraine.
It appears that both supporters and detractors of Ukraine have been spreading the message, with some commending Zelenskyy for banning Truth Social and others accusing the president of restricting free speech.
The claims follow a war of words between Zelenskyy and Trump, which began when the US president launched a barrage of inaccuracies against his Ukrainian counterpart, including that he was a “dictator without elections” and was ranking low in opinion polls.
Zelenskyy responded by saying that Trump was living in a Russian “disinformation space”.
Many of the posts claiming that Zelenskyy banned Truth Social — which Trump launched after he was banned from Twitter (now X) and Facebook in 2021 — allege that he did so in retaliation against Trump’s falsehoods.
But they are yet another example of misinformation, because Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns the platform, has said as much.
It said that Truth Social was never available in Ukraine, a statement which has been backed by the Ukrainian government itself.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on X that “Ukraine did not and could not block access because, unfortunately, the social network Truth Social has never made itself available to users in Ukraine”.
He added that the government “would appreciate it” if Truth Social added Ukraine to its list of authorised countries, flying in the face of any suggestion that Zelenskyy is trying to suppress free speech.
Various posts sharing the false claims have already been community-noted, linking to articles from other fact-checkers who have also debunked the allegations.
Following Trump’s return to the White House, he’s repeated a number of untruths about Russia’s war in Ukraine, many of which feed into the Kremlin’s own propaganda.
In addition to the false claims that Zelenskyy is a “dictator”, Trump has suggested that Ukraine started the war, but this is blatantly untrue: Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, after annexing the Ukrainian territory of Crimea in 2014.
He’s also made misleading claims about the amount of aid the US has sent to Ukraine compared to European countries, as well as false assertions that Zelenskyy has admitted to some of the money going missing.
