After a Russian air strike on the Khmelnytskyi region in western Ukraine on May 13, 2023, charts showing higher levels of radiation were shared on social media in Polish and Slovak. They came with the false claim that the increase stemmed from the fact that ammunition containing “depleted uranium” had been destroyed in the attack.
A doctored photo began circulating on social media in multiple languages in the spring of 2023. It purported to show European Council President Charles Michel, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in front of a grey statue with breasts and male genitalia. In fact, the image was altered to superimpose the leaders – from a photo taken in Kyiv in 2023 – against the nude statue found in The Hague.
Soon after Finland joined the NATO defence alliance in April 2023, a video appeared online with the claim that it showed Russian ballistic missiles being moved through a town near the Finnish border — which is also the EU’s eastern frontier, as Finland is a member. Our investigation uncovered that the clip was in fact filmed in a town nearly 1,000 kilometres away from the border with Finland.
A video of people entering the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco in March 2022 is presented in social media as showing migrants scaling a fence at the United States border with Mexico in May 2023, as the US government prepares to lift pandemic-era immigration restrictions.
The photo of the convoy was shared on social media in April 2023 with the claim that it showed police escorting Ukrainian grain through the Polish village of Korczowa, located by the border with Ukraine. This information is false.
Several Chinese-language social media posts claimed a video of a person getting tackled by the police showed the “assassination of French President Emmanuel Macron”, in the Netherlands on April 12, 2023 during a visit to promote ties between the two key EU members.