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Phony FT Story

Did the Financial Times publish a video on social media reporting that "a Bombardier employee deliberately defaced aircraft parts to protest the company's return to the Russian market"? No that's not true: The Financial Times did not publish this report, and there are no credible reports of this type of employee sabotage happening at the Canadian aviation company. The post on X carrying the report is very similar to other propaganda narratives spread by a Russian disinformation network identified by researchers.

The claim appeared in a post published by @jequielcurato on November 20, 2024. The post was captioned:

🚨 @Bombardier workers protest against the company's return to the Russian market @FT #protest @Canada @AskISED @CanadianPM #Canada

This is how the post appeared at the time of writing:

(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Nov 21 16:20:59 2024 UTC)

The post contains two elements: On the right is a QR code that points to the main page at www.ft.com but not to the article in question -- because no such article exists. On the left is a 1:20-minute-long video that begins by showing the Financial Times "FT" logo. An AI-generated voiceover describes something that did not happen. The narrator says:

A Bombardier employee deliberately defaced aircraft parts to protest the company's return to the Russian market. A Quebec plant worker was caught defacing parts for the rear fuselage. When detained, he explained that he was thus protesting against the resumption of Bombardier's cooperation with Russia.

At 20 seconds in, a photo of Max Bernhard is shown. The narrator then reads a fake quote attributed to the real investigative journalist:

Even if Bombardier has to send half of its employees to jail, it's still better than their 2022 decision to leave the Russian market. I am happy that Bombardier's slow suicide is coming to an end and they are returning to Russia.

Bernhard is an investigative journalist with the German fact checking organization correctiv.org and was one of the writers contributing to an article published on November 15, 2024. The article, titled, "Doppelganger: CORRECTIV investigations bring Russian propaganda campaign to a halt," describes in detail how the Russian disinformation campaign named Doppelganger used copycat websites resembling trusted news sources and a technique called "cloaking" to hide their activity from social media moderation. CORRECTIV traced the Russian campaign's fake websites to Western web hosts that took down the sites when CORRECTIV asked about them.

On November 21, 2024, Bernhard posted a screenshot of the post from @jequielcurato, the video frame advanced to show the segment with Bernhard's image, matching his X profile picture (pictured below). He wrote:

A Russian disinformation campaign is distributing a fake @FT report with made up quotes attributed to me. They've previously done this with other publications/people like @bellingcat @EliotHiggins or @DeutscheWelle

(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Nov 21 16:24:35 2024 UTC)

An advanced Google search (pictured below) (archived here) queried for the relevant keywords that supposedly appeared in an article on the ft.com website turned up no results. Another advanced Google search for this narrative's keywords reported anywhere (archived here) also returned no matches. No press releases from bombardier.com match the narrative.

(Source: Google.com screenshot taken on Thu Nov 21 17:15:38 2024 UTC)

Lead Stories reached out to the Financial Times press office for comment and Leah Graf, communications manager, responded on November 26, 2024, saying in an email: "The video is not FT journalism. The FT's brand and logo have been used without permission."

An analysis of the fake FT video using the tools at TrueMedia.org found "substantial evidence of manipulation" (read full report here; archived here). In particular, the three voice cloning or voice generation tools gave strong readings -- one showing 100 percent confidence that the audio was generated with AI.

(Source: truemedia.org screenshot taken on Thu Nov 21 16:23:49 2024 UTC)

Additional Lead Stories fact checks on claims arising from a Russian disinformation campaign can be found here, here and here.