Is it true that in New York, at the request of the Ukrainians, an advertisement was placed with the phrase “Helping the Jews = burning money”?

In mid-October 2023, Internet users distributed a video allegedly filmed in the United States. If you believe numerous posts, a video banner was shown on one of the New York streets calling for help not to Israel, but to Ukraine. We have verified the authenticity of the viral video.

The video began to circulate on social networks a few days after attacks Hamas militants against Israel and the military operation that began in response. The recording lasts only 8 seconds. It shows that a media billboard located on one of the kiosks in New York shows a stove in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, in which banknotes are burning. “Helping Jews = burning money. Support Ukraine!” (Helping Jews = burning money. Stand with Ukraine!) - read the inscriptions on the screen. On social networks you can find publications whose authors are accused of ordering this alleged advertisement “Banderaites", Ukrainians, team Vladimir Zelensky, and sometimes himself president Ukraine.

Such posts gained the greatest popularity in the pro-Russian Telegram segment, where the video was published by the channels of publications “Tsargrad-TV"(32,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Political navigator"(34,000) and Avia.pro (19,000), as well as "Sanya in Florida"(381,000 views), "Observer"(215,000), "Uncle Slava"(207,000), "Sheikh Tamir"(132,000), "Kot Kostyan - official channel"(110,000), "What happened?"(105,000), Zergulio (103,000), "Alexander Semchenko"(89,000), "Federation"(85,000), "Evgeny Prigozhin on Telegram"(77,000), Fox News Russia (76,000), "I'm aware"(73,000), "Talipov 𝐎𝐧𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞"(63,000), "Boiling water"(54,000), "Ax | Policy"(49,000), "Coachman" (34,000), "Batkovich"(32,000), Nina Vatt (31,000), "Baybayden"(29,000), "I'm shocked" (27,000), "Antichips" (23,000), "Denazification UA" (20,000) and "Before everyone else. Well almost. Special operation"(12,000). There is a video on VKontakte (examples here, here, here And here), social network X (formerly Twitter; here And here), Facebook* (here And here), TikTok (here, here And here), LiveJournal (here And here), on YouTube and some otherswebsites.

The viral video was analyzed by our colleagues from fact-checking projects StopFake And Factcheck.kz. Below “Verified” retells their analysis.

At the top of the advertising screen, on which the video is supposedly shown, there is a letter combination JCDecaux is the name of a transnational corporation engaged in the installation of outdoor advertising (we mentioned her in our analysis of fake anti-Ukrainian advertising in Paris). StopFake Editorial appealed For comment, contact the company's press service, where the viral video was called a fake. “This video is fake, because we have never broadcast such a campaign on our street equipment,” replied Clementine Prat, Managing Director of Communications at JCDecaux.

Center for Combating Disinformation (CDD), an organ of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, statedthat the fake video is based on a video filmed a month ago and published on the YouTube channel The NYC Walking Show — they post first-person videos of walks along the streets of New York. However, representatives of the Ukrainian department did not provide a link to the original post.

DPC output confirmed Factcheck.kz journalists who watched a number of recordings of walking tours of the American metropolis and on the above-mentioned channel found a video entitled “Virtual walking tour of New York - Billionaires' Row, New York City, 4K, walk.” The video was published August 23, 2023, and it was filmed, according to the description, a few days earlier - on August 19. The fragment we are interested in, almost identical to the viral video, begins at the time mark 06:03: it was shot from the same angle, it shows the same passing cars and people passing by, and the same reflections are visible on the glass of buildings and in the puddle. The only difference is that the billboard in the YouTube video does not contain a message about the pointlessness of providing assistance to Israel. The original post at the time was advertising an event for cancer charity Stand Up To Cancer. passing just on August 19th.

The earliest publication with a fake video that Verified was able to track was appeared on the evening of October 12, 2023 in the Voblya Telegram channel (184,000 views), mentioned in our analyzes several dozen times. At the same time, in the post of this channel on the video there is a corporate logo, which is absent in many other publications (there are no traces of its removal in them). This suggests that there is an earlier post that we did not detect, or the spread of the fake began from several sources at once.

Thus, the Ukrainians did not order an advertisement demanding an end to aid to Israel, since such a message was never broadcast on the streets of New York. The company that runs the media billboard called the viral video a fake, and fact checkers found that the fake was based on a publicly available video that had been re-edited.

*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social network Facebook, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.

Cover photo: social networks

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

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