TikTok has a Spanish-language fake news problem
🤥 Faked Up #42: Fake Telemundo accounts spread fake green card news; JFK archive declassification spurs conspiracy theories; and Italian savings rumors target EU rearmament plan
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Today's newsletter is a ~5 minute read and contains 60 links.
NEWS
MrDeepFakes is now blocked in the Netherlands. >50% of the claims made in a sample of TikTok videos about ADHD don't check out. Tesla fans likely gamed a survey by a German news portal. Filipino institutions are investigating disinformation about extrajudicial killings following the arrest of Rodrigo Duterte. A Norwegian man is suing OpenAI after ChatGPT falsely claimed he murdered his kids. A Wisconsin political mailer masquerading as a newspaper is part of the Metric Media pink slime network. Character.AI hosted four chatbots impersonating the teenager who took his life after engaging in suicidal thoughts on the platform. A thriving market for fake IDs is leveraging fake Indian government sites. RT is surreptitiously supporting a range of YouTube influencers. A Florida bill on deepfake nudes moved forward; a New Jersey one suffered a setback. A deepfake of JD Vance badmouthing Elon Musk got two million views on TikTok.
TOP STORIES
Fake Telemundo accounts spread fake green card news on TikTok
25 TikTok videos claiming that legal permanent residents are banned from entering and leaving the United States were seen more than 21 million times before being deleted by the platform.
This is the latest wave of misinformation from a group of 38 accounts presenting as Spanish-language news sources that I have written about in the past three issues. Most of the accounts involved have generic names like noticiasdeusas, noticiasdeldiausa1 or noticias._oficial, but eight of them explicitly impersonate Telemundo and Univision.
I believe that the group I'm monitoring includes at least two coordinated networks, based on the similarity of their content and reposting patterns. The accounts have more than 2 million followers all together and regularly get hundreds of thousands of views on their videos.
They post obsessively about Donald Trump and frequently cover fictional updates to his immigration policy.