00:00Fake footage allegedly shows Zelensky's friendship with Jeffrey Epstein
00:08Social media users are sharing these AI-generated images, falsely claiming that they're from
00:14security camera footage of Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky with convicted sex offender
00:19Jeffrey Epstein. In the pictures we can see a figure resembling Zelensky shaking hands and
00:24talking with Epstein, with the captions alleging that the two were close and met each other in
00:28intimate non-public settings on the disgraced financier's private island. However, there's
00:33plenty of evidence to prove that the images are fake. Firstly, we ran them through Google's
00:38AI platform Gemini, which detected a Synth ID on the image. This is an invisible watermark
00:44developed by Google which shows that all or part of the content was created or modified
00:48using Google's AI tools. The images are also grainy and low quality, which is typical of
00:53AI-generated content that tries to hide inconsistencies and mimic security camera footage.
00:59Additionally, the timeline doesn't add up. The pictures show Zelensky as he has appeared
01:03since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. But Epstein died in
01:09August 2019, only a few months after Zelensky became President. There's no credible evidence
01:15that the two ever met. The cube has trawled through the Epstein files, the latest tranche of
01:19which was released in January. And while Zelensky's name does appear in them, it's only in the
01:24context of news reports or the 2019 elections that saw him become President. This isn't the
01:29first time that false claims have tried to link Zelensky and Epstein. Other fact-checkers have
01:33debunked previous instances where pro-Russian telegram channels spread false narratives of a
01:38connection between Zelensky, Epstein and human trafficking. Following the release of the latest
01:43files, other European politicians were falsely labeled as having links to Epstein, including France's
01:48president Emmanuel Macron and the leader of the British far-right party ReformUK, Nigel Farage.
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