"Living corpses" in Bucha, Putin tattoos in a German hospice, Hitler on the cover of "Vogue," and World Cup fans "bought" by Qatar — Just some of the news stories DW fact-checkers examined in 2022.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, was followed by an information war — replete with a large-scale disinformation campaign, targeted propaganda and conspiracy theories, especially on social media. Beyond that, NewsGuard, a US journalism and technology outfit that has been fighting disinformation for years, identified 311 websites publishing pro-Russian disinformation to justify Moscow's war of aggression against its neighbor.
So it is no wonder that DW's fact-checking team spent most of its energy in 2022 dealing with false claims surrounding the war in Ukraine. But our team also got to the bottom of other odd stories on topics related to health, sports and the environment. Here are 10 of the most blatant and unusual.
Images of dead civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, near Kyiv, horrified the world in early April. Hundreds of dead bodies lay strewn across the streets of the city in late March after Russian forces withdrew.
Ukrainian authorities spoke of a "deliberate massacre" carried out by Russian soldiers. Russia countered with its own accusation, claiming that videos from Bucha were a "staged propaganda production." An accompanying narrative soon appeared on social media, with claims that the victims were in...
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