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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?