There are still few certainties about the perpetrators and especially the instigators of the attack on the Crocus City Hall in Moscow: it was claimed by Isis-K (or Isis Khorasan), the Afghan branch of the jihadist group, but Russia practically immediately tried to shift the blame towards Ukraine.
Also fabricating non-existent evidenceas is emerging from multiple sources both in Europe and in the United States, collected and explained in a recent NewsGuard report.
twitter: Danilov’s deepfake
The role of AI in disinformation in Russia
To the work of traditional disinformation, which these days is carried out by sites and newspapers close to China, Iran and Russia with at least 150 articles published between 22 and 26 March in an attempt to blame the attack on the West, another more advanced and modern one was added, based on deepfakes and artificial intelligence.
Last March 23NTV (the second most popular TV channel in Russia) showed a video in which Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the Security Council of Ukraine, seemed to say something like “it’s fun today in Moscow, I like to think that we will organize this kind of fun for them more often”. The video was widely shared on social media and also on Telegram and according to many “essentially confirmed Ukraine’s involvement in the terrorist attack.”
But the video is completely falseas they both confirmed NewsGuard (Who)both colleagues of Open (Who) be the Ukrainian Center against Disinformation (Who): in particular, the CPD explained that it was a deepfake, that “Danilov’s facial expressions and way of speaking do not match” and that the footage would have been created using old clips of Danilov manipulated using artificial intelligence to make him say other things than those originally said.
Information out of context, traditional disinformation
Another video that caused a lot of reactions on social networks (especially on Twitter) it’s the one where Kyrylo Budanov, responsabile dell’intelligence in Ukraine, he would reply “I’m very happy to see this” to an ABC News reporter who asked him for comment on the attack. The words were really said, but not in connection with the terrorist attack in Moscow: the interview is from January 2023 (over a year earlier, it’s this one) and Budanov was talking about an attack on a Russian air base.
Another very common lie is that ISIS’s claim would not be real: RT India wrote it on Twitter on March 22, collecting over 1400 likes and reactions and explaining that the ISIS statement would be “false” because “it uses a template that ISIS abandoned many years ago”. A similar editorial line was followed, on Telegram, Reddit and 4Chanfrom many channels close to the Kremlin such as RT and Gazeta.
Actually, the claim was deemed true and reliable from many sources that are decidedly more authoritative according to NewsGuard, such as CNN, New York Times and Financial Times; the ISIS-affiliated Amaq news agency also has released a video of the attack which was allegedly filmed by one of the attackers.