Latest fact checks & sources

Vladimir Putin’s online followers love sharing videos or photos of the Russian president that play up his strongman image. But sometimes in doing so, they share fake and manipulated videos – which then go viral. The Truth or Fake team take a look at two examples.

Whether it’s on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, there are plenty of fake accounts. People using these accounts hide behind a fake avatar and incite debates or mock other users. Sometimes even the profile pictures are completely fabricated – they’re not real people. In this episode, the Truth or Fake team shows you how to spot these fake photos. [Ed. note: As of 2024, spammers can use AI to create profile pics that can’t be identified using this technique.]

Just like on any social media platform, there’s a lot of disinformation to be found on TikTok. But whereas Facebook and Twitter have flagged some accounts as potentially biased or untrustworthy, TikTok allows these videos to pop up in people’s feeds. This week, Truth or Fake takes a look at a video about Syria doing the rounds on TikTok.

It’s a heartwarming story: a Danish humanitarian worker, Anja Ringgren Loven, helped this starving child in 2016. The moment when she offered him water was captured on camera, and the picture went viral online.

Two pictures of a white, futuristic building in a forest went briefly viral in early April with the false claim that the building belonged to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

For this section, we will look at claims that come in form of images. The images could be distorted to misrepresent an issue. It could as well be an old image shared to depict a new reality but from a different context. Whichever form an image is presented on the internet you might be able to verify it with the aid of tools for image fact-checking such as are Google Reverse Image Search, Tin Eye, InVid, Yandex and so on.

On September 20, the official Twitter account of the Permanent Mission of Russia in Geneva published a photo entitled “Modern Ukraine. Human Rights on the Upgrade”, showing a building with Ukrainian and Nazi flags. However, this photo has been “wandering” around the Network under different titles for a long time. Let us recall that it was taken during the shooting of a movie in Kharkiv in 2011.