00:00Fake footage allegedly shows Zelensky's friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
00:08Social media users are sharing these AI-generated images,
00:12falsely claiming that they're from security camera footage of Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky
00:17with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
00:20In the pictures, we can see a figure resembling Zelensky shaking hands and talking with Epstein,
00:25with the captions alleging that the two were close and met each other in intimate, non-public settings
00:30on the disgraced financier's private island.
00:32However, there's plenty of evidence to prove that the images are fake.
00:36Firstly, we ran them through Google's AI platform Gemini, which detected a SynthID on the image.
00:42This is an invisible watermark developed by Google,
00:45which shows that all or part of the content was created or modified using Google's AI tools.
00:50The images are also grainy and low quality, which is typical of AI-generated content
00:54that tries to hide inconsistencies and mimic security camera footage.
00:59Additionally, the timeline doesn't add up.
01:01The pictures show Zelensky as he has appeared since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early
01:072022.
01:08But Epstein died in August 2019, only a few months after Zelensky became president.
01:13There's no credible evidence that the two ever met.
01:16The cube has trawled through the Epstein files, the latest tranche of which was released in January,
01:21and while Zelensky's name does appear in them, it's only in the context of news reports
01:25or the 2019 elections that saw him become president.
01:29This isn't the first time that false claims have tried to link Zelensky and Epstein.
01:32Other fact-checkers have debunked previous instances where pro-Russian telegram channels
01:37spread false narratives of a connection between Zelensky, Epstein and human trafficking.
01:41Following the release of the latest files, other European politicians were falsely labelled as having links to Epstein,
01:47including France's President Emmanuel Macron and the leader of the British far-right party ReformUK, Nigel Farage.
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