How false information gets made, moved and believed

A lot of misinformation isn’t invented from nothing. It’s recycled. A real video from one year and one country gets a new caption in another. A real quote loses the sentence before it. A chart keeps its numbers and drops its axis. The material is genuine, which is exactly why it works.

Then there’s the newer problem: images, audio and video made by AI that never happened at all. The tells are getting harder to spot by eye, so this desk leans on process instead. Where did the file first appear? Who posted it, and when? Does any reliable outlet with people on the ground report the same event?

We also look at why a piece of misinformation spreads, because the reason it’s believed usually tells you where to look next. The feed below shows recent examples from Full Fact, where old footage relabeled as breaking news turns up again and again.