For France's Press and Media in Schools Week 2023, France 24's Observers team, specialised in debunking misinformation, has produced a new annual edition of "Truth or Fake", a short programme giving tips on how to disentangle fact from fiction.
Soldiers fighting... missiles destroying tanks... war scenes in full splendor. Footage from video games is so realistic that it is often used to portray real-life war scenes.
"Victims" of Russia's war in Ukraine who mysteriously move while being filmed? That's according to a recent post on TikTok. It's not true, but how do you prove it?
Since February, several Facebook and Twitter accounts versed in disinformation have been regularly sharing impressive videos purporting to show the war in Ukraine. But these viral images actually come from a video game called Arma 3. How can you spot these realistic spoofs that have even fooled international media? In this episode, the Truth or Fake team asks Pavel KÅižka, representative of Bohemia Interactive, the company that developed Arma 3.
Determining whether a scene actually took place where a social media user said it did - also known as geolocation - has become a major part of verifying social media posts. In this article, we take a look at some essential geolocation tools and walk you through a few case studies from the FRANCE 24 Observers team.
Since 2018, the FRANCE 24 Observers team has been sharing tips for helping you to verify images that circulate online yourself. In this guide, we'll explain how to avoid falling into online traps - whether they involve photos or videos taken out of context or ones that have been actually doctored. We'll keep updating this guide, to keep you up to date on verification tools available for public use.
With Eastern Europe in turmoil following the invasion of Ukraine, a Facebook post shared hundreds of times claims Russian President Vladimir Putin is 'in South Africa'. The post includes a video broadcast showing Putin arriving in the country for alliance talks. However, this is misleading: the video was filmed in July 2018 ahead of the 10th summit of the BRICS group, which was hosted by South Africa.
A video of a railway track being removed has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times after it circulated in posts that claim it shows Lithuania cutting off transit with a Russian exclave after the EU sanctioned certain goods in response to Russia's invasion of neighbouring Ukraine in 2022. Although Lithuania did follow the EU sanctions in blocking certain goods to Kaliningrad, the video has been shared in a false context. It was uploaded in a 2017 post about railway repairs in Estonia, years before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Keyword searches found no official reports about Lithuania removing the railway track.
Two videos have been viewed over a million times in social media posts that claim they show an Indonesian flag flown during a concert by German rock band Scorpions after Indonesian President Joko Widodo visited Ukraine and Russia to urge peace talks in late June 2022. The claim is false; the videos were taken during a Scorpions concert in Poland on May 28, 2022. News reports say the Polish and Ukrainian flags had been flown at the concert, not the Indonesian flag.
A video has been viewed tens of thousands of times in multiple social media posts that claim it shows Russia attacking Ukraine with a vacuum bomb in 2022. The claim, however, is false. Although Russia has been accused of using such weapons in Ukraine, the video in fact is a digital creation of a visual effects artist.
