“ntv fact mark”
AfD, kebabs, pizza boxes – how to recognize fake news
Julia Weber
February 5, 2024, 4:38 p.m
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Can this really be true or is this deliberate misinformation? The new show on ntv uses several examples to show when you should become suspicious and how counterfeits can be exposed.
The World Economic Forum ranks the spread of misinformation through artificial intelligence as the biggest risk of a global crisis in the next two years. Fakes can now be produced without much technical knowledge and spread extremely quickly on the Internet and, in the worst case, influence elections.
Real news and images also suffer because they are discredited as fake. This is exactly what happened with the reporting on the demonstrations against the AfD, which was denounced as manipulated by right-wing extremist media. With a critical eye and a short research, the images were easy to recognize as truthful.
But this is difficult for many people. A Bertelsmann study shows that it is not easy for most consumers to identify whether information on the Internet is real or false. Almost half of those surveyed could not assess this.
The new format “ntv Fact Mark” aims to counter disinformation and takes viewers on a search for the truth. The first case in “Faktenzeichen” is a clip with Chancellor Olaf Scholz. In the YouTube video he explains: “Dear fellow citizens. On the fifth anniversary of Walter Lübke’s death on June 2, 2024, my government will apply to the Federal Constitutional Court to ban the Alternative for Germany party. I am personally asking you for your help today. ” At first glance, the video seems real.
But what is noticeable: In many places the video is mixed with images, the Chancellor’s voice is out of sync with the audio track in some places and you can’t see his hands once in the entire 3:45 minutes. A conscious decision, confirms Burak Kahraman from the RTL and ntv verification team. Hands are difficult to recreate in detail in AI-generated videos. The absence is an indication of a fake.
Overall, you never see Scholz talking for long at a time in the clip, but if you pay attention to his lips, you can see the asynchrony between the sound and video. There is a suspicion of a deepfake – a video created using artificial intelligence. The suspicion is confirmed because Kahraman found the original video from which the deepfake was generated. It is the Chancellor’s televised speech on the occasion of the Russian attack on Ukraine.
The program “ntv Fact Mark” will show what other evidence ultimately reveals the video as a fake and who is behind it today at 7:30 p.m. There is also a picture of mountains of pizza waste that is said to have been taken after the Green party conference and a video in which Angela Merkel swears that kebab prices will remain stable at 3 euros.