Is this even real?
Chapter II
Fake & misleading content
Photos, quotes, charts and sites that are not what they claim to be.
- Out-of-context photos & videos Real footage with a false caption: an old war video, a protest from another country or a video-game clip presented as proof of something that is happening right now.
- Fabricated quotes A face, a name and a sentence the person never said (or said about something else entirely), packaged as a quote card that is easier to share than to check.
- Fake screenshots A doctored tweet, an invented headline on a real outlet’s layout or an edited chat: screenshots are trusted like evidence, but can be faked in a browser in two minutes.
- Deepfakes & AI-generated media AI-made video, images and cloned voices that show people doing or saying things that never happened, from a fake presidential surrender to a phone call in your mother’s voice.
- Cheapfakes Low-tech video and audio manipulation (slowing a clip down, cropping, cutting, re-dubbing) that needs no AI and fools more people than deepfakes ever have.
- Misleading headlines & clickbait A headline that promises more than the article delivers, or the opposite of it. Since most people never click, the headline becomes the whole story.
- Misleading charts & cherry-picked statistics Real numbers arranged to tell a false story: a chopped y-axis, a convenient start date, a percentage with no base rate, a correlation sold as a cause.
- Fake experts & fake institutes An impressive title, a lab coat or an “institute” that is one person and a website, used to make an opinion sound like science. The tobacco industry wrote the playbook.
- Cloned news sites A pixel-perfect copy of a real news outlet on a lookalike domain, publishing articles the real outlet never wrote. The Doppelganger campaign did it to dozens of European media.
- Satire shared as real news A joke article loses its label somewhere between the satire site and your feed and arrives as fact. Some “satire” sites exist only to make that happen.