Visitors to a Ukrainian news website on the evening of February 18 2022, were greeted by a familiar sight, a video of their president giving a speech. While the resemblance was there, the face seemed slightly out of sync with the head of the Ukrainian president.
In the video, Volodymyr Zelensky announced that the war was over, a fact that the majority of Ukrainian people knew was false. It was a deepfake video. While this was happening online, the ticker at the bottom of the screen on the channel’s live television feed read the same message. It claimed – again, falsely – that Ukraine was surrendering.
Our team at the Lero research centre in University College Cork has just published a first-of-its-kind study examining the ways in which deepfake videos were presented and discussed on Twitter during the early months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
