In the days after a deadly missile strike blasted a railway station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, a viral online video — dressed as a news report — sought to pin the blame on Ukrainian forces.
The one-minute-27-second video claiming that Ukrainian forces had bombed their own station was stamped with the branding and logo associated with BBC News, the London-based broadcast network.
But the clip was a fake.
“We are aware of a fake video with BBC News branding suggesting Ukraine was responsible for last week’s missile attack on Kramatorsk train station,” the BBC press office said in a statement on Twitter at the time. “The BBC is taking action to have the video removed.”
The phony BBC News video spread widely as Russian state media broadcast it on TV and the web and Kremlin-aligned accounts shared it across the messaging app Telegram. The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which tracks and researches disinformation, identified at least 30 channels on Telegram that shared the clip or screenshots of it.
A few days later, several reporters said they spotted pro-Russia Telegram channels circulating yet another fabricated post posing as a BBC News report. This one was a fake tweet that shared a made-up quote supposedly attributable to French President Emmanual Macron.
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