Fake news: the top stories from last week you might have missed
A lot of fake news information has been shared on social media platforms in the last week. We’ve rounded up a list of the top stories, which were verified by fact-checker media organisations.
French president dancing in nightclub
A video of the French President Emanuel Macron dancing in a nightclub has been identified as a deepfake. Shared Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube, the footage showed Mr Macron dancing while wearing a variety of outfits. The fact-checker organisation Full Fact found that the video showing the dancers has been on YouTube for many years. The footage comes from around 1986-87 at Stratus Dance Club in California in the United States. The footage was a creation of AI.
The captain of the ship who hit the bridge in Baltimore is Ukrainian
On March 26, 2024, a container ship named Dali lost power and crashed into a pillar of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key bridge, plunging parts of it into the Patapsco River below. After that, Fact-checking organisations have flagged up as false information many posts on Facebook claiming that the captain of the ship Dali is a citizen of Ukraine
There was no evidence for this. One of the first websites that posted this claim was the Russian website Pravda and pro-war Russian Z-channels on Telegram. Generally supporting the Kremlin’s party line, according to the media organisation Lead Stories.
Japan is banning COVID vaccines
Posts on social media claiming COVID vaccines ban in Japan, with more than 2.5 million views are not true. Users have widely shared this information in an article by a conspiratorial website prepareforchange.net on Facebook and X . The article claims, without evidence, that the move came after “an official government study tied the injections to the nation’s soaring sudden deaths.” Japan’s health ministry has said that COVID-19 vaccinations will no longer be free of charge starting in April, but has not announced a ban on the vaccines, according to Reuters.
Photo of the Russian oligarch, Yevgeny Prigozhin on a train this year
A viral photo shared on X by Sprinter Factory showed the former director of Russia’s Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin. He died last year.
The photos show the profile of a man looking out of the window on a train with the captions on X: “A photo from a train is going viral on social networks, where such an interesting person was spotted.”
The X account @runews was the first to share on 3 March the photos from the train, according to FullFact.