France 24 journalist impersonated in new deepfake video

FRANCE 24 English

Visit our website: http://www.france24.com  Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/France24_en

Transcript

00:00 Time now for Truth or Fake. Emmanuel Macron had planned to visit Ukraine today, but on Monday,

00:04 the Elysee Palace announced that the French President's visit had been postponed, primarily

00:08 for security reasons. Since then, however, video has been circulating on social media, where else,

00:13 claiming that the reason for the cancellation was that the French Secret Services intercepted

00:18 an assassination attempt against Macron. This announcement was supposedly made by us, France24,

00:25 in a news bulletin on our French language channel. Except, yes, it's all a fake.

00:31 Emmanuel Macron is here to shed some light on this. Very good evening to you.

00:35 Now, you've been looking at this video with our observers fact-checking team. Tell us

00:38 what you've found out. Well, this video supposedly shows an extract of a France24 news bulletin on

00:44 our French channel, presented by Julien Fanchouli. And first of all, I'd like to show viewers a short

00:50 extract of it. It is in French, so I'll explain what it says. But first of all, let's take a quick

00:55 look at it. So in that video, we see that the presenter is heard saying that Emmanuel Macron

01:17 has been forced to cancel his visit to Ukraine following an attempt on his life, which was

01:21 stopped by the French Secret Services, who managed to intercept correspondence and calls, etc.

01:25 It goes on to say that the Ukrainian authorities plan to shift the blame onto Russia in order to

01:30 bring the world's attention back onto the Ukraine's plight, of course. So the first thing to say is

01:36 that these pictures were indeed taken from a France24 news bulletin broadcast on Monday. But

01:41 both the sound and the headline strap have been changed because, of course, our channel never

01:46 announced this alleged risk of assassination. In fact, this video is a deep fake, of course. Another

01:52 example, someone has used AI to make our presenter's voice say something completely different from the

01:57 original video, Mark. Indeed, you can see, can't you, the kind of lip syncs not quite right, but

02:02 it's dastardly accurate the way they've done it. This kind of portal combat thing we've been

02:06 talking about. Where's this been shared? Yes, absolutely. You can find it on the usual social

02:11 networks, of course, X, where it's been posted by both English and French speaking accounts.

02:16 But when we tried to trace the origin of the video, we also found it on VKontakt, which is

02:21 Russia's equivalent of Facebook, and that's been circulating since yesterday. As well as that, it

02:27 was on the Telegram messaging app. Several pro-Russian channels have been sharing it since

02:32 yesterday as well on Telegram. And we also noticed that a French language site called Pravda.fr

02:38 had shared the fake news yesterday. This site may not mean anything to you or me, Mark,

02:44 but Vigenum, which is the French government's protection service against foreign digital

02:48 interference, well, it identifies Pravda.fr as a pro-Russian propaganda outlet. And in its latest

02:55 report published 12th of February, Vigenum states that this site targets Western countries that

03:00 support Ukraine following Russia's full-scale invasion. And it shares content with, I quote,

03:04 pro-Kremlin narratives. Portal combat, indeed. So talking of deepfakes, more and more are cropping

03:12 up. Remind us just exactly what they consist of. Well, deepfakes consist of imitating someone's

03:17 face or voice or both more or less successfully with tools using artificial intelligence. So

03:24 basically it's now possible to get anyone to say anything by manipulating video and a few sound

03:30 extracts from a person. In this case, for example, our presenter's voice has almost certainly

03:35 been imitated using voice cloning software. And it's been based on extracts from real news

03:40 bulletins to reproduce his tone of voice. In recent months, we've also seen a number of

03:45 political figures falling victim to deepfakes, including Emmanuel Macron, Joe Biden and Vladimir

03:52 Zelensky. Fortunately, though, these deepfakes are not yet perfect. And in this case, for instance,

03:58 we can see that the video has been manipulated. There are a few clues. As you said, the movement

04:03 of the presenter's lips don't quite go with his voice in the video. And that's perhaps why it was

04:08 shared not as it's at the video itself, but it was a recording of the video on a screen.

04:14 The presenter's intonation is also a little peculiar, as is the wording used. So I would

04:21 also add that a simple Internet search shows that this false information was not published

04:26 by any serious media outlet. In short, it is possible to spot the hoax with a little vigilance.

04:31 Mark, thank you for flagging it up. Emerald, great to see you. Truth or fake?

Category

Transcript

Recommended