A video on Facebook claims to show news footage of the war in Ukraine, in which a man can apparently be seen moving inside a body bag while posing as a dead body. The video is accompanied by the caption “EVERYTHING YOU ARE TOLD IS A LIE”.
This video has been manipulated. The original is actually a clip from an Austrian TV report about climate change protesters in Vienna, which was filmed on 4 February, before the Russian invasion began.
In the Facebook video, the text on the bottom of the screen has been altered to show a news update about the war in Ukraine, although it is not clear which media organisation it is purporting to be from. The audio has also been replaced with what appears to be a genuine clip of an American broadcaster talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
As the news presenter (who in the original footage is speaking German) is wearing a mask, it’s very difficult to spot that the movements of his face do not match with the audio in the video.
We have seen the same footage in the past, when it was used to claim that a “crisis actor” in Germany had been spotted making the mistake during a news broadcast, albeit without the altered caption at the bottom.
As we have written before, the term ‘crisis actor’ can refer to trained actors or volunteers who participate in exercises to train emergency services. However, it has also become used to describe someone claimed to have been paid to feign death or illness in news broadcasts to further an agenda, for example in the context of Covid-19.