News in Mobile Air Raid Alert Apps and Media Literacy in Ukraine During the War Time

The article is devoted to the analysis of the Ukrainian mobile air raid alert apps and news they haveproduced and delivered to the Ukrainians since 2022. The authors analysed changes in the criticalperception of news information in the target audiences, including vulnerable groups of society, asthey receive information from military news integrated into two mobile applications. The first oneis Air Alert, verified by the Ukrainian government, known as “Official map of air alerts of Ukraine”.The second one is the volunteer media channel, best socially oriented IT initiative in Ukraine in2024, a mobile application Air raid alert map of Ukraine. These two applications are widely usedby Ukrainians staying at home during the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war since February 24,2022 till now. The transformation of access to information and level of critical thinking in Ukrainein accordance with the way news is disseminated in air raid alert apps is noted. We determinedthat the level of media literacy depended on alarm numbers and durations and numbers of medianews about missiles and explosions, announced alerts, artillery shells or risks of urban warfare.Our investigations are based on data analysis of 118 interviewed users of Air Alert and Air raidalert map of Ukraine apps, aged 18-85 years old, including internally displaced young people aged18-22 replaced from their birth places mostly from Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson or Zaporizhzhyaregions of Ukraine to Volyn as a safer region in the west of the country, and older persons aged50-85 years living here. In this first part of research, we found out that 37% of persons, also fromamong the vulnerable groups, followed the notifications of air raid alert applications and newsabout military actions with reference to their places of birth, residence at the time of the startof the war and residence as of 2023 and showed a greater tendency to a higher level of criticalthinking. About 63% said they couldn’t think critically after the three years of full invasion andfull-scale hybrid information and psychological operations. Critical thinking is significantly reducedin conditions of stress, negative news about death or captivity, unstable work of mobile networksand Internet providers, and often due to the impossibility of quickly verifying information. In thesecond part of the research, the news consumption models for relocated persons accordingto the way of interacting with the news content of mobile air raid alerts applications and otherchannels of receiving news were examined. In this part, the interviews with 43 respondents wereanalysed. The AI generated fake news in usual communication channels of vulnerable groups areinvestigated and factors influencing media literacy in crisis conditions are discussed.