Before it was debunked and taken down, hackers posted a fake and heavily altered video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on a Ukrainian news website on Wednesday.
The video is a so-called deepfake that lasted about a minute and depicts the Ukrainian president giving the impression that he is telling his soldiers to lay down their arms and give up the fight against Russia.
The deepfake's creator is unknown at this time, but Ukrainian officials have been warning for weeks that Russia may be disseminating manipulated videos as part of its information warfare. Ukraine's tactical insight organization delivered a video this month about how state-supported deepfakes could be utilized to plant frenzy and disarray.
Even though the lip sync in the video is decent, viewers quickly pointed out that Zelenskyy's accent was off and that his head and voice didn't look like they were real.
The video was removed from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter for violating policies, according to officials. In the meantime, the deceptive video was made more popular on Russian social media.
H-A N Y Farid, an expert in digital media forensics at the University of California, Berkeley, said, "This is the first one we've seen that really has some legs, but I suspect it's the tip of the iceberg"
In a video posted to his Telegram channel, Zelenskyy responded to the fake video by saying: "We are defending our land, our children, our families. So we don't plan to lay down any arms. Until our victory."
The message was not just displayed across social media, however. It also appeared briefly on television in Ukraine and on a news broadcaster's website.
The national television station Ukraine 24 confirmed that hackers managed to send the fake Zelenskyy message across live television on the scrolling-text news crawl known as "the ticker," and the video showed up briefly on the news station's website. It was the work of "enemy hackers," the station said.
The messages the hackers managed to broadcast through Ukraine 24 urged Ukrainians to stop fighting and give up their weapons. They also falsely stated that Zelenskyy had fled Kyiv, according to the Atlantic Council's Eurasia researcher Roman Osadchuk
The messages were amplified on VKontakte, the social network comparable to Facebook that is popular in Russia and controlled by allies of the Kremlin, Osadchuk noted
According to the researchers, the deepfake should still be considered dangerous despite its lack of sophistication.
Sam Gregory of the human rights organization Witness, which specializes in identifying unverified media during crises, stated, "The deepfake is not very well done."
He said the Ukrainian government getting out before the deepfake by advance notice about controlled recordings weeks before this one was delivered, as well as Zelenskyy himself rapidly saying it was a phony, eased back its spread in the West, however conceivable lower-quality forms of the video could take on an unmistakable overflow of energy in different regions of the planet.
Gregory stated, "If you look at other global contexts where the deepfake is of poor quality or of good enough quality to create room for doubt, and it's not so easy to challenge it directly."
According to the researchers, the video, regardless of where it originated from or its quality, may in the future cause some individuals to question the veracity of Zelenskyy's videos.
Gregory stated, "The specific issue is also around the so-called liar's dividend, where it's easy to claim a true video is falsified and place the onus on people to prove it's authentic."
Added Farid: He stated, "It pollutes the ecosystem of information and casts a shadow over all content, which is already dealing with the complicated fog of war." Some individuals might wonder, "Wait a minute — is this real?" the next time the president appears on television.
A Twitter spokesperson stated that the company will permit the video to be shared in order to expose it as fake. Yet, assuming the video is being presented to mislead individuals, it will be brought down, the organization said
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