On Wednesday, Facebook’s parent company Meta confirmed that it has removed a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy issuing a statement, asking Ukrainians to lay down their weapons.
The deepfake was the first broadcast on a Ukrainian news website called TV24 after a hack, as reported by Sky News on Wednesday. The video shows an edited Zelenskyy speaking behind a presidential podium and in front of a backdrop, both of which feature the Ukrainian coat of arms declaring that the country has “decided to return Donbas” to Russia and that his nation had lost the war.
The video was identified as a deepfake after it was noticed that Zelenskyy’s head is comically larger in the video than in real life and is more pixelated than his surrounding body. Even the fake voice was pointed out to be much deeper than his real voice.
2/ We've quickly reviewed and removed this video for violating our policy against misleading manipulated media, and notified our peers at other platforms.
— Nathaniel Gleicher @[email protected] (@ngleicher) March 16, 2022
Meta’s head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, put out a Twitter thread announcing that the video had been removed from the company’s platforms. He said:
Earlier today, our teams identified and removed a deepfake video claiming to show President Zelensky issuing a statement he never did. It appeared on a reportedly compromised website and then started showing across the internet.
Earlier this month, the Ukrainian government issued a statement warning soldiers and civilians to adjourn their operations when they encounter videos of Zelenskyy surfacing online, especially if he announces a surrender to the Russian invasion.
Furthermore, an official statement from the Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communications said that the Russian government would likely use deepfakes to convince Ukrainians to surrender.
However, after the deepfake started to circulate across the internet, Zelenskyy posted a video to his official Instagram handle negating the video.
As for the latest childish provocation with advice to lay down arms, I only advise that the troops of the Russian Federation lay down their arms and return home. We are at home and defending Ukraine.
