Fact-Check Dispatch: German elections, AI-generated Pope, and media publish Toronto plane crash AI image
Issue 12 of the Spotlight Fact-Check Dispatch
Spotlight is a newsletter created by Eurovision News in collaboration with Members of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). It aims to combat misinformation and promote fact-checking efforts in Europe. The newsletter serves as a platform to showcase the fact-checking work of European public service media broadcasters.
German Elections
“The right-wing extremist conspiracy medium AUF1 from Austria offers numerous AfD politicians a platform in the federal election campaign. Since its founding in 2021, the medium has been spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories, for example about the corona pandemic or an alleged population exchange by the elites. In this environment, AfD politicians can make false claims without being contradicted; politicians from other parties are not given a chance to speak. The AfD also places a large number of advertisements on the medium's website,” the collaborative team concludes.
Staying with our colleagues at Bayerischer Rundfunk, Sophie Rohrmeier investigated videos claiming that the AfD was missing from ballot papers in the Leipzig I constituency in order to prevent its voters from voting.
“Videos of manipulated ballot papers from Leipzig pose the risk of undermining confidence in the correct conduct of postal voting for the 2025 federal election. The alleged ballot papers are not genuine, but fake. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that they do not begin with line "1", but with "2". The investigative authorities are looking into the case. The perpetrators are still unknown,” Rohrmeier writes.
Moving to Sweden, colleagues at Swedish broadcaster SVT analysed posts by X owner Elon Musk relating to the German elections and his repeated message that the AfD was “Germany’s only hope.”
SVT VERIFIED writes: “I have not supported any political party and have no idea what the AfD is,” tweeted Elon Musk on October 1, 2023. After that, Musk seems to have formed a clearer opinion about the right-wing nationalist German party.”
“During the period October 1, 2022 to February 19, 2025, Elon Musk has tweeted a total of 45,166 times including replies, quotes and retweets. The graph shows how Musk's Twitter tempo has increased since he bought the platform,” SVT says.
“Analyzing the video originally shared to TikTok under the title “Rezemos pelo Papa Francisco”, we see several indicators that the content is AI-generated. Firstly, the footage is highly saturated, and the movements of the people within the footage are stuttering,” Bowler reports.
“Finally, the video contains footage of Jesus Christ embracing the Pope at his hospital bed, while the final image shows an angel sprouting wings and embracing the Pope,” he says.
A photo widely shared on social media and several news sites purported to show Delta Flight 4819 on the runway after crash-landing and flipping onto its roof at Toronto Pearson International Airport on February 17. However, the image was AI-generated, reports
.“Numerous other online outlets included the image in their reporting, including Indian outlets News 9 Live and Mirror Now, which used thumbnails of the image. Newsweek România also used the image, which was found in a report by El Debate on msn.com/es-mx,” Powell writes.
“On closer examination, the image features a logo for the AI chatbot Grok, which is integrated into the X platform (formerly known as Twitter), indicating that the image was created using AI,” he continues.
After United States President Donald Trump signed an executive order that provides for the resettlement of Afrikaners as refugees to America, images of white South African squatters have been shared thousands of times online, linking rising poverty among South Africa’s white population to expropriation.
of the Eurovision Social Newswire says the images are old and cannot be directly attributed to any kind of expropriation of white South Africans by the post-Apartheid government.“A reverse image search of the photos shared in the X post above showed that they were not new but had already been used in reports by the UK’s Mail Online in 2016 and 2019. Therefore, they are not directly linked to the Expropriation Act. Rather, a BBC report dating back to 2008 about the rise of poverty among white South Africans gives some of the reasons for rising poverty levels among this group,” Hauser writes.
The ESN’s
investigated a claim made in a podcast series by conservative activist Candace Owens that French First Lady Brigitte Macron is a transgender woman.“Owens repeated claims that have been made numerous times in recent years: that Macron was born a boy by the name of Jean-Michel Trogneux. Owens said in her video introducing the series that she had received a “legal threat” from the Élysée Palace over her previous publication of the claims,” Flannery writes.
“There is no evidence to support claims that Brigitte Macron is a transgender woman, and the theory was already debunked when a court found people who had spread the rumour guilty of libel,” she concludes.
The White House’s Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino shared a video showing Kash Patel’s face on the body of a man dancing in a crowd of people, with the caption: “Congratulations to the new Director of the FBI.”
reports that the clip features Kash Patel’s face on the body of Bollywood star Ranveer Singh in a clip from the film Bajirao Mastani.“The video appears to feature Kash Patel entering an arena of men dressed in traditional Indian warrior dress while a song plays out in the background, before a group dance performance takes place. Although the video is obviously altered, we wanted to find the source of the footage shared by such a high-profile White House official,” Flannery says.
“To find the original video, we carried out a reverse image search on stills of the clip. This led us to the official music video for the song Malhari. The 3:52-minute video shows the warriors dancing as the music plays in the background,” she says.