A fake video of President Zelensky calling on his troops to lay down their arms and surrender to Russian forces has been pulled from social media but the incident has raised concerns about a new front emerging in the information war around the invasion.
The “deepfake” circulated on social media and was briefly planted by hackers on live television in Ukraine and on a Ukrainian news website before it was spotted and removed. The minute-long video also received widespread play on Russian social media.
The broadcaster Ukraine 24, which saw Zelensky’s message to surrender planted in the “ticker” along the bottom of the screen, denounced the work of “enemy hackers”.
The video was of poor quality and was spotted immediately. Viewers noted that Zelensky’s body did not move at all, while his accent and lip-sync were wrong.
The incident has raised alarm that Russia could flood social media with similar efforts in an attempt to discredit all information put out by the Ukrainian government.
Advertisement
“The fact that it’s so poorly done is a bit of a head-scratcher. You can clearly see the difference — this is not the best deepfake we’ve seen, not even close,” Mounir Ibrahim at Truepic, a company backed by Microsoft to root out deepfakes and manipulated media online, told The Daily Beast website. “As we start seeing more and more cheap fakes, deepfakes flood the zone, it’s going to desensitise people and allow bad actors to allege, ‘Nothing is real on the ground, you can’t trust anything’.”
Zelensky responded to the fake with a video of his own on his Telegram channel, assuring supporters: “We are defending our land, our children, our families. So we don’t plan to lay down any arms. Until our victory.”
Ukraine said this month that Russia and its supporters might seek to spread disinformation about the invasion through fake videos and other media. At home, Russian media is already waging a rigorous campaign to conceal Russian casualties on the battlefield and claim that videos of Ukrainian civilian dead and destroyed buildings in besieged cities has been staged by Zelensky’s government.
“Videos made through such technologies are almost impossible to distinguish from the real ones,” Ukraine’s Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security said in a statement. “Be aware, this is a fake! His goal is to disorient, sow panic, disbelieve citizens and incite our troops to retreat. Rest assured, Ukraine will not capitulate!”
