🤥 Faked Up #30

YouTube takes down bogus billionaire bracelet ads, Britons pour milk down the drain, and Romanian NGOs call for more data from platforms

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HEADLINES

The Pentagon is paying Hive AI $2.4 million over two years for its deepfake detectors. Lula’s health conditions and surgery are inspiring conspiracy theories. A spam network was pushing plagiarized pro-Democratic content on BlueSky. International human rights groups condemned the criminal case against Indian fact-checker Mohammed Zubair. OpenAI says its deceptive election content classifier scored 98% on recall and 89% on precision in evaluations for its new video generator Sora. A threat intelligence company claims that Eleven Labs synthetic voices were ‘very likely’ used in a Russian info op. The U.S. Senate unanimously approved criminalizing the publication of synthetic NCII and mandating that platforms remove it within 48 hours of notice; the bill now moves to the House.

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TOP STORIES

BILLIONAIRES’ BOGUS BRACELET

YouTube and Facebook ran¹ hundreds of ads for a “feng shui bracelet” that’s supposed to make you instantly rich. There are multiple variations of the video, but they follow roughly the same script.

Speaking to the camera, an unidentified man or woman claims to have been struggling with money until a mysterious good-hearted stranger gave them the bracelet, suddenly reversing their fortunes. Promotions, lottery tickets, house purchases! Everything is supposedly possible with this bracelet.

In a recent variation, the bracelet was sloppily photoshopped on the wrists of Adam Sandler, Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Tom Cruise, and Will Smith.² They are all part of a cabal that’s apparently been hiding the secret of their success…on their wrists?

I couldn’t find an exact equivalent on TikTok, though there are loads of ads for the bracelet making less bombastic claims (and a few that have been taken down for policy violations).

I emailed Google for comment on Tuesday night and did get a swift response from spokesperson Nate Funkhouser. He told me that “we expressly prohibit ads that falsely claim celebrity endorsements in order to scam people” and that Google had taken down the ads and a related advertiser. The company enforced on tens of millions of scammy and fraudulent ads in 2023.

I emailed Meta for comment on Wednesday morning. By that evening, the company had removed the relevant ads and blocked the advertiser.

If you want to get it on the scheme, the miraculous talisman can still be acquired for a mere $39. And it comes endorsed by these 100% human reviewers!

ROMANIA’S RUINED ROUND

Romania’s constitutional court annulled the first round of the presidential election that saw far-right candidate Călin Georgescu win 22.9% of the votes. According to fact-checking site Factual, Georgescu has said that COVID-19 isn’t real, the moon landings and the Twin Tower attacks were staged, and bottled water isn’t H₂O.

The election was canceled in part due to documents declassified by the country’s intelligence services suggesting Russian interference in the run-up to the vote.

Much of the international coverage of the alleged interference has referred to a reported 25,000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts created two weeks before the vote.

But it’s more than just TikTok. As early as June, Context had uncovered a network of Facebook pages masquerading as news sites promoting right-wing politicians. The publication claims this network spent 46,000 euros in ads supporting Georgescu, who reported spending no money on campaign expenses. Meta told Context it is reviewing the network but found no evidence of inauthentic behavior nor any violation of its policies.

Building on these findings, the nonprofit Check First claims “the network has spent at least 139,858 EUR and up to 224,083 EUR on the campaign since August 2024, reaching a total audience of 148 million, according to data from the Meta Ad Library.” Some of these ads may have violated rules on the electoral silence period.

Check First believes this network is affiliated to a company called DGI Multimedia Design SRL, which has previously collaborated with the right-wing party Alliance for the Union of Romanians. DGI spent 27,850 euros on Google ads, receiving over 30 million views.

Finally, there’s the role of Telegram. According to the media startup Public Record, “dozens of websites coordinated from Russia and Telegram channels supported Călin Georgescu's candidacy.” The sites include Russian state-aligned media like Tsargrad and the Romanian version of Pravda, part of an internationally-facing pro-Kremlin network dissected by France’s Viginum.

I am certainly not an expert of Romanian constitutional law, so I don’t know whether any of this is enough to warrant an extraordinary measure like annulling the vote. What is certain is there will be unprecedented scrutiny on the role of online electioneering and the more data platforms make available, the better.

As a coalition of Romanian NGOs wrote in an open letter to the EU Commission:

At the moment, we lack sufficient information to assess whether or not other relevant online platforms in Romania (Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, YouTube) have made real efforts to facilitate a fair electoral process, and what the result of these efforts was.

Among other things, the open letter calls for the “correct implementation” of the Digital Services Act in Romania. Expect this to be a major test for the transparency requirements embedded in the act.

Thanks to Elena Calistru for helping me find useful sources for this item.

BO-SCARE

Angry Britons are spilling their milk and calling for a boycott of dairy producers who use Bovaer, a supplement meant to reduce methane in cow burps and farts. Their concern flows from a misunderstanding of the findings around the safety of Bovaer, a brand name for 3-Nitrooxypropanol or “3-NOP”.

The controversy erupted last week following news that multinational dairy company Arla was trialing the feed additive in 30 British farms. The scandal was fanned by Reform MPs, tabloid news and TV channels. It has since expanded to Australia, where the supplement is used by cattle farmers to produce “carbon-neutral” beef sold at the supermarket Coles.

The British Food Safety Agency wrote in an advisory last Thursday that “there are no safety concerns when Bovaer is used at the approved dose.” (The European Food Safety Authority has also deemed it safe.)

It is probably too late to change perceptions: A search for [Bovaer] on TikTok returns overwhelmingly conspiratorial takes, including that it’s just “another way of f***ing over the farmers” by putting people off animal produce or that it’s actually a depopulation scheme aimed at reducing the sperm count of those who drink it. (Similar results emerge on Instagram, X, and YouTube).