CLAIM: A screenshot shows a Politico article about the war in Ukraine titled, “20 000 000 lives for the sake of freedom,” which reported that Ukraine will need to sacrifice millions of lives to win its war against Russia.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The screenshot of the article is fabricated and the news outlet has never published such a story, a spokesperson for Politico confirmed to The Associated Press.
THE FACTS: Russia’s embassy in South Africa tweeted the falsified image this week, suggesting that the political news outlet had published the article to its website.
CLAIM: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene published a Twitter post reading, “How can the Titanic submersible run out of air if you breathe both in and out?
News outlets are warning of a deadly TikTok challenge that involves people jumping off speeding boats.
CLAIM: A video shows a “World Economic Forum agent” calling for a cashless society and saying those determined “less desirable” will be locked out.
“#Ukraine will need 20 000 000 lives to ‘return’ territories – Politico,” reads the post. “As they have already said, #NATO is pushing a war to be fought until the last Ukrainian.”
The fabricated image mimics how an article would look if viewed on Politico’s website from a mobile device. It includes the outlet’s logo and a tag above the headline that reads, “Research,” but the text is also full of grammar and punctuation errors.
For example, the headline, which reads, “20 000 000 lives for the sake of freedom,” is missing two commas. “And this, as turned out is almost the entire working-age population,” reads a subheadline, which leaves out the word “it,” among other mistakes.
Searches on Politico’s website show no record of such an article and Melissa Cooke, a spokesperson for the outlet, confirmed in an email to the AP that “this article was not published by POLITICO.”
The Embassy of the Russian Federation in the Republic of South Africa did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its tweet.
Ukraine is in the initial stages of a counteroffensive that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described as aimed at liberating areas occupied by Russia.
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.
