"They're burning the village now," one Syrian user reported on Facebook.

"Which village?" another asked.

"Please, we want the shooting to stop so we can bury the bodies that are filling up the streets," somebody else from Jableh, a town near the coastal city of Latakia, where the violence that killed about 800 people over the weekend apparently began.

"I am in Jableh. Nothing is wrong. There's no shooting," another man wrote, adding to the confusion.

After supporters of ousted President Bashar Assad launched attacks on the new Syrian security forces late last week, Syria saw its worst wave of violence since Assad's fall in early December.

By Monday, the situation had mostly calmed. But the weekend also marked Syria's worst wave of disinformation since early December, say researchers at Syrian fact-checking organization Verify-Sy.

"We observed a significant surge," Zouhir al-Shimale, a researcher and communications manager for Verify-Sy, told DW. "Coordination among malicious online actors reached its highest level since Syria's liberation."

Over the past week, "disinformation was closely linked to real-life coordination on the ground," al-Shimale said. "In chat rooms and private direct messages, malicious actors urged Alawites (a minority of which many call the Syrian coast home) and other minorities to flee, warning of an imminent genocide while encouraging men to take up arms and attack government posts."

Verify-Sy also noticed increasing use of generative artificial intelligence to manipulate footage and alter voices to produce "highly provocative and graphic content."

Some of the pictures and videos posted of war crimes and killings were real.

© Deutsche Welle