The challenges of identifying deepfakes ahead of the 2024 Brazil election
By Beatriz Farrugia, for DFRLab BANNER: Screencaps from a fake video featuring President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva that was shared on July 1, 2024 by Kim Kataguiri, then a pre-candidate for mayor of São Paulo. (Source: Kim Kataguiri/Instagram) For the first time, Brazil will hold elections under electoral regulations that stipulates strict transparency rules […]
Categories: World News
Putin Rids Russia of a Troublesome Priest
The Kremlin dishes out a lesson in clerical obedience to a churchman with heterodox views on Ukraine. By Elisabeth Braw, for CEPA Three short years ago, Metropolitan Hilarion was still the Russian Orthodox Church’s second-in-command, in charge of relations with the rest of the world. The relatively young cleric, an internationally respected theologian with a doctorate from Oxford, […]
Categories: World News
The Kremlin’s Disaster Disinformation Exploits in Poland
By EUvsDisinfo Since mid-September, an uncharacteristically heavy rainfall has caused a series of floods across Central Europe. One country particularly affected by the unseasonal inundations was Poland. As Polish authorities declared a state of emergency, and rushed to rescue those already affected and evacuate people from potential danger, the Kremlin’s disinformation peddlers saw an opening to […]
Categories: World News
The Kremlin Decorates the Disinfo-Christmas Tree Early at the UN
By EUvsDisinfo During his speech at the UN General Assembly’s High level Week, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov kicked off the festive season early and decorated a veritable disinformation-Christmas tree with a selection of anti-Western, anti-EU, and pro-Kremlin talking points. Lavrov’s boss Putin could not come to New York because he is wanted for deporting Ukrainian children. Not wanting to […]
Categories: World News
Fake: Ukraine’s National Debt Will Soon Exceed 1000% of the Country’s GDP
The propagandists multiplied the real data by 10: in fact, the national debt amounts to 97% of the GDP. Pro-Russian sources report that by the end of next year, Ukraine’s public debt will reach more than 1,000% of GDP. «They galloped normally on the Maidan» – the propagandists sneer at this topic. However, the propagandists […]
Categories: World News
RT (Russia Today) as guerrilla activist
By EUvsDisinfo Most of the time, Kremlin mouthpieces such as RT and Sputnik conceal their continued defiance of EU and US transmission bans. They regularly ridicule warnings by Western governments about continued Kremlin influence operations, in particular meddling in democratic elections. They often interview sympathetic ‘analysts’ or politicians to claim that these warnings are baseless and ‘hysterical’ expressions […]
Categories: World News
Running Out of Red Paint
By EUvsDisinfo This week, many things have a slight United Nations flavour, as world leaders gather in New York for the 79th UN General Assembly (UNGA) High-level Week. In this context, the more fundamental topics of war, peace, global stability and security come into the limelight. For the Kremlin, the UNGA is a place to unleash […]
Categories: World News
Fighting disinformation in Central Europe: showing StopFake’s best practices in Prishtina, Kosovo
StopFake is proud to announce Prishtina as our next stop! It’s an amazing opportunity to learn more about fake news, how to spot it and how to counter disinformation. StopFake is 10 years old this year. To celebrate, the famous Ukraine-based team of fact-checkers has teamed up with Google News Initiative to go on tour. […]
Categories: World News
Fake: The Visa Payment System is Returning to the Russian Market
Renewal of the trademark by the company does not prove that Visa is returning to Russia. Such an act by the company would be a direct violation of sanctions. Pro-Russian sources are spreading the news that Visa, one of the world’s largest payment systems, is returning to the Russian market. As «proof» of this, the […]
Categories: World News
Fighting disinformation in Central Europe: showing StopFake’s best practices in Podgorica, Montenegro
StopFake is proud to announce Podgorica as our next stop! It’s an amazing opportunity to learn more about fake news, how to spot it and how to counter disinformation. StopFake is 10 years old this year. To celebrate, the famous Ukraine-based team of fact-checkers has teamed up with Google News Initiative to go on tour. […]
Categories: World News
Onward Putin Soldiers
By Julia Davis, for CEPA The Kremlin’s mouthpieces once denied they were the regime’s playthings. No longer. In the years preceding September’s US revelatory indictments against RT employees, the prominent Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan often boasted about Russia’s covert operations in the United States when she appeared on state television. After the veil was yanked off RT’s American storefront by the September 4 […]
Categories: World News
The Kremlin’s Multipolar Order of Disinformation
By ERUvsDisinfo September is a busy month at the United Nations. Delegations from all over the world flock to New York to take their seats at the General Assembly, the Mount Olympus of multilateral diplomacy. For most, this a momentous occasion to engage in sincere efforts to safeguard the rules-based international order as the foundation […]
Categories: World News
Manipulation: Pentagon Will Not Be Able to Use $5.8 Billion Allocated for Aid to Ukraine by the End of Fiscal Year
The Pentagon intends to use «every dollar and cent» of the $5.8 billion from the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) program, under which weapons can be provided to Ukraine from U.S. stockpiles. Russian media and social networks are actively spreading manipulative information based on a briefing by Pentagon representative Sabrina Singh. The reports, citing data from […]
Categories: World News
Manipulation: Ukraine Recruits Mentally Unstable Foreigners — The Washington Post
Propagandists distorted the content of the article in The Washington Post. In reality, the piece discusses how crises, including the war in Ukraine, often attract unscrupulous or mentally unstable individuals seeking personal gain. «Support for Ukraine is for lunatics» and «The Armed Forces of Ukraine are recruiting unstable and dangerous people» — these are the […]
Categories: World News
The Remorseless
By EUvsDisinfo Lavrov and pro-Kremlin propagandists continue their macabre dance on the graves of innocents, revealing once again the true, cruel nature of Putin’s regime. The more monstrous the crime, the less appetite the Kremlin and its henchmen show for remorse. Instead, they continue their macabre dance on the graves of those whom the Russian […]
Categories: World News
Homegrown Terrorism: Putin’s Dirty Secret
By Kseniya Kirillova, for CEPA Some Russian propagandists have broken with the Kremlin narrative by questioning if NATO and Ukraine are behind an upsurge in terrorist attacks. The June 23 attack on police, churches, and a synagogue in Dagestan, which killed 20 and wounded 46, created an unexpected reaction in the Russian media. A series of propagandists, Telegram […]
Categories: World News
MH17: Ten Years of Russian Lying and Denying
By EUvsDisinfo July 17 marks the 10-year commemoration of the dramatic event in which Russia fired a BUK 9M83 surface-to-air missile from the temporarily occupied territories in Ukraine to shoot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, killing all 298 civilians on board. The Netherlands and Australia have established that Russia is responsible for the deployment of the Buk […]
Categories: World News
Hospital bombing was latest act in Russia’s war on Ukrainian healthcare
By Olha Fokaf, for UkraineAlert The bombing of Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital in Kyiv on July 8 has sparked a wave of global condemnation, with US President Joe Biden calling the attack a “horrific reminder of Russia’s brutality.” Meanwhile, others have noted that this latest airstrike was not an isolated incident. “Once again, Russia has deliberately […]
Categories: World News
Barely a Wobble: Russians Trust Tsar Vladimir
By Walter Clemens, for CEPA Russian public opinion is not very different from the 19th century. The tsar can do no wrong. Problems are blamed on administrators, or things that can’t be changed. Unlike the serfs, freed in 1861, today’s Russian population is literate and has access to books, periodicals, and computers to find the facts […]
Categories: World News
Photo Fake: Ukrainian Soldiers Pose with a Swastika Flag
The photo shared online is fake. Several programs for analyzing the image authenticity indicate that the photo was modified or generated by a computer program. In addition, the original source of the photo is an English-language Telegram channel, which is supposedly pro-Ukrainian, but writes approvingly about the «radical right-wing movements flourishing in Ukraine». Moreover, Ukraine […]
Categories: World News