Pages and accounts across social media shared a video claiming it documents Syrian army artillery carrying out First Corps drills around the Damascus countryside and the Lebanese border.
The circulating clip underwent close visual examination and advanced digital analysis by the fact-checking team, which found it to be fake. The visual examination detected illogical motion artifacts — soldiers’ bodies passing through parts of the artillery in ways that defy the laws of physics — along with a glaring error in the Syrian flag, which appeared with two stars instead of three. To confirm these indicators, the clip was run through Hive Moderation, a tool specialized in detecting digital content, whose results confirmed that both the video and the audio track were entirely generated using AI tools, at a rate exceeding 98%.
Why is this claim misleading?
An AI-generated video: The claim relied on fully AI-generated video and audio, promoted in a misleading context that purports to document real military movements and drills on the ground.
