Latest news with #DWFactCheck
DW
a day ago
- Science
- DW
Fact check: Climate deniers misinterpret Antarctic ice study – DW – 06/26/2025
Satellite data shows that Antarctic ice sheets have grown in size, prompting claims that climate change is in reverse or even a hoax. But it's not that simple. A recent study has found that the Antarctic ice sheet mass has slightly increased in size in recent years, prompting a wave of claims on social media (such as here and here) that global warming may be reversing. Published in March 2025 by researchers at Tongji University in Shanghai, China, the study reported that the Antarctic ice sheet gained approximately 108 billion tons of ice annually between 2021 and 2023. This data focused on four glacier basins in the Wilkes Land-Queen Mary Land region of the eastern Antarctic ice sheet, has been misinterpreted by some climate skeptics as evidence that climate change is a "hoax." DW Fact Check looked at the numbers. Claim: Posts on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) have gone viral, with one stating, "Moral of the story: Never believe a climate alarmist," garnering over 270,000 views. Another viewed more than 55,000 times, claimed,"Scientists have had to pause the Climate Change Hoax Scam." DW Fact Check: Misleading One post even featured a GIF that the user believed showed new land emerging off the coast of Dubai due to falling sea levels — apparently unaware of the artificial Palm Islands constructed there between 2001 and 2007. The findings in the Chinese study are based on publicly available data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites, which have been measuring the Earth's gravitational field since 2002 and have documented changes in the planet's ice and water masses. The data may be correct, but its interpretation by conspiratorial social media users is not — a situation not helped by the researchers' decision to insert an increasing average trend curve next to the preceding decreasing curve depicting ice mass. "This is perfect fodder for people who are intentionally looking to spread disinformation," said Johannes Feldmann, a physicist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research near Berlin. Feldmann emphasized that climate science relies on long-term data — typically over 20 to 30 years — to identify meaningful trends. "Two, three or even five years are far too little to identify a long-term trend," he explained. Cherry-picking short-term data is a common tactic among climate change deniers. "There are always phases where the increase [in temperature] levels off a bit, which people suddenly take to mean: global warming has stopped, the trend is reversing," Feldmann added. "But it's never turned out to be true." To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video The Antarctic ice sheet, like many natural systems, is subject to fluctuations. A 2023 study from the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom highlighted how meteorological events, such as unusually heavy or light snowfall, can temporarily affect ice mass and sea levels. Therefore, fluctuations such as those observed between 2021 and 2023 are to be expected. "We're dealing with a natural system that is subject to fluctuations — and this is nothing unusual," said Angelika Humbert, a glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, northern Germany. "We sometimes have years with a lot of snow and sometimes years with no snow at all, and it's the same for ice sheets." The Tongji University researchers themselves acknowledged this in a separate 2023 study, linking increased ice mass in eastern Antarctica to unusually high snowfall. "Given the warmer atmosphere, we know that these snowfall events could increase in the coming years," said Feldmann. "On the one hand, this means more snow could fall more often [on the ice sheets] but also that more could melt — because it's getting warmer. "This is all well-researched and will continue to be researched," he added. "There was a brief increase [in Antarctic ice mass], but it didn't come anywhere close to replacing the losses of recent decades. The long-term development we are observing is a large-scale loss of the Antarctic ice sheet."
DW
5 days ago
- Politics
- DW
Did NATO expansion drive Russia to war? – DW – 06/25/2025
NATO has allegedly deceived and disrespected Russia by expanding into Eastern Europe, threatening Moscow's interests. That, at least, is how the Kremlin has justified its war in Ukraine. But is there any truth to it? NATO leaders have gathered in The Hague in the Netherlands on June 24 and 25 to discuss the topic of increased defense spending, and support for Ukraine will be high on the the agenda. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is now well into its fourth year. As the fighting drags on, the United States has increasingly demanded that its NATO allies shoulder a greater share of the costs of funding the alliance, whose members have been providing significant military and financial support to Kyiv. In the past four years, NATO has been a target of false narratives time and again. DW Fact Check looked at some of the most common claims. However, for the Russian President Vladimir Putin, NATO itself represents a threat to Russian national security — especially since its post-Cold War expansion into Eastern Europe, which includes countries that had formerly been part of the Soviet Union or at least in the Soviet sphere of influence. The prospect of Ukraine, a country with even stronger historical and cultural ties to Russia, drawing closer to or even joining NATO — or indeed the European Union — has been cited by Putin as justification for Russian interference in Ukraine since 2014 and the so-called "special military operation" launched in February 2022. As early as March 2000, speaking to the BBC in one of his first interviews as Russian president, Putin insisted that he was not opposed to NATO but stressed concerns about the alliance's eastward expansion, which by that point had already seen Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic join as members. Despite NATO's insistence that the alliance was purely defensive, Putin was not convinced. He considers the expansion a breach of trust in the wake of the so-called "Two Plus Four Agreement," the September 1990 settlement regulating the reunification of West and East Germany (the "two") and signed by the four allied powers which had occupied Germany at the end of World War II: the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union. According to Putin, the Western powers had promised that NATO would not expand eastwards into territory formerly controlled by the Soviet Union. NATO has always denied this claim. The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, or the Two Plus Four Agreement, made it clear that no foreign (meaning non-German) troops or nuclear weapons were to be permanently stationed on the territory of the former East Germany. But the German Interior Ministry states that the deal made "no binding assertions regarding the eastward expansion of NATO or the admission of other members." But what informal promises and statements were made, what exactly they entailed and how they are to be interpreted has been the subject of heated debate among both politicians and historians ever since. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin quoted former NATO Secretary-General Manfred Wörner who said in a speech in Brussels in May 1990: "The fact alone that we are prepared not to station NATO forces beyond the borders of the Federal Republic [of Germany] gives the Soviet Union firm security guarantees." As a 2016 German government position paper on the topic points out, however: "Neither in this speech nor at any other point did [Wörner] declare that there would be no eastward expansion of NATO." For Putin and his allies, two other well-documented comments made by senior German and US politicians in February 1990 are of particular importance: former US Secretary of State James Baker's proposal to Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev of "assurances that NATO's jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position," and former West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher's commitment to a "non-expansion of NATO." According to Tim Geiger of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, however, these words should not be taken out of context. Writing on behalf of the German Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr, Geiger argues that Baker's and Genscher's suggestions merely serve to demonstrate the lengths to which the West German foreign ministry was willing to go at the time to accommodate Soviet concerns regarding German reunification, but had never constituted German or American foreign policy. Indeed, he points out that, within two months, both US President George H. W. Bush and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had dismissed the ideas as unworkable since they contravened a country's right of freedom to select alliances. This argument is also made by Jim Townsend, senior fellow at the CNAS Transatlantic Security Program, who worked both for and with NATO in various roles throughout the 1990s. "It was all about Germany and German unification," he told DW. Gorbachev himself confirmed as much in an October 2014 interview in which he stated: "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all … Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn't bring it up, either." But that's not enough for Joshua Shifrinson, associate professor of international politics at the University of Maryland, who told DW that Gorbachev's apparent rejection of Putin's theory has also been taken out of context. Indeed, the former Soviet president also said in the same 2014 interview that the first eastward expansion of NATO in the 1990s was "a big mistake from the very beginning," and "definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990." Among the sources analyzed by Shifrinson are the previously classified minutes of a meeting of the chief US, British, French and German ambassadors to NATO in March 1991, also reported by , in which the German representative Jürgen Chrobog said: "We had made it clear during the Two Plus Four negotiations that we would not extend NATO beyond the [River] Elbe. We could not therefore offer membership of NATO to Poland and the others." According to the minutes of the meeting, photos of which DW has also seen, none of Chrobog's colleagues objected. Indeed, France's Raymond Seitz even added: "We had made it clear to the Soviet Union — in Two Plus Four and in other exchanges — that we would not take advantage of the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe." For Shifrinson, this is proof that NATO had not just committed to keeping foreign troops out of eastern Germany, but that "people were thinking about the future of Eastern Europe in general." Benjamin Friedman, who also analyzes relations between Russia and NATO for the US think tank Defense Priorities, added: "The United States didn't make some solemn promise that we would never expand NATO, but we certainly gave the Russians that impression and I think that upset them." Regardless of the ongoing debate, said Shifrinson, "it's incontrovertibly true that Russia invaded Ukraine. You can acknowledge that assurances were given and later abrogated and still not justify Russian behavior." "The expansion or prospect of expansion [of NATO] to Ukraine was a huge cause, not the only one, but a huge cause of the war," said Friedman. "There's a difference between making a statement about causality and a statement about guilt or moral responsibility." Townsend, who after stints at the Pentagon and NATO, moved to the Atlantic Council think tank, also sees Russia as the clear aggressor. "We didn't do anything to upset the Russians, we were very careful about that, and they gave us the green light during those days," he said. "It wasn't until Putin's speech that he gave at the Munich Security Conference that they suddenly had a problem." If NATO has made any mistake, in Townsend's mind, it's a very different one. "If there was any kind of actions that NATO took, [that might have destabilized the European security architecture], it was by not getting strong enough."
DW
5 days ago
- Politics
- DW
Fact check: Did NATO expansion drive Russia to war? – DW – 06/25/2025
NATO has allegedly deceived and disrespected Russia by expanding into Eastern Europe, threatening Moscow's interests. That, at least, is how the Kremlin has justified its war in Ukraine. But is there any truth to it? NATO leaders have gathered in The Hague in the Netherlands on June 24 and 25 to discuss the topic of increased defense spending, and support for Ukraine will be high on the the agenda. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is now well into its fourth year. As the fighting drags on, the United States has increasingly demanded that its NATO allies shoulder a greater share of the costs of funding the alliance, whose members have been providing significant military and financial support to Kyiv. In the past four years, NATO has been a target of false narratives time and again. DW Fact Check looked at some of the most common claims. However, for the Russian President Vladimir Putin, NATO itself represents a threat to Russian national security — especially since its post-Cold War expansion into Eastern Europe, which includes countries that had formerly been part of the Soviet Union or at least in the Soviet sphere of influence. The prospect of Ukraine, a country with even stronger historical and cultural ties to Russia, drawing closer to or even joining NATO — or indeed the European Union — has been cited by Putin as justification for Russian interference in Ukraine since 2014 and the so-called "special military operation" launched in February 2022. As early as March 2000, speaking to the BBC in one of his first interviews as Russian president, Putin insisted that he was not opposed to NATO but stressed concerns about the alliance's eastward expansion, which by that point had already seen Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic join as members. Despite NATO's insistence that the alliance was purely defensive, Putin was not convinced. He considers the expansion a breach of trust in the wake of the so-called "Two Plus Four Agreement," the September 1990 settlement regulating the reunification of West and East Germany (the "two") and signed by the four allied powers which had occupied Germany at the end of World War II: the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union. According to Putin, the Western powers had promised that NATO would not expand eastwards into territory formerly controlled by the Soviet Union. NATO has always denied this claim. The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, or the Two Plus Four Agreement, made it clear that no foreign (meaning non-German) troops or nuclear weapons were to be permanently stationed on the territory of the former East Germany. But the German Interior Ministry states that the deal made "no binding assertions regarding the eastward expansion of NATO or the admission of other members." But what informal promises and statements were made, what exactly they entailed and how they are to be interpreted has been the subject of heated debate among both politicians and historians ever since. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin quoted former NATO Secretary-General Manfred Wörner who said in a speech in Brussels in May 1990: "The fact alone that we are prepared not to station NATO forces beyond the borders of the Federal Republic [of Germany] gives the Soviet Union firm security guarantees." As a 2016 German government position paper on the topic points out, however: "Neither in this speech nor at any other point did [Wörner] declare that there would be no eastward expansion of NATO." For Putin and his allies, two other well-documented comments made by senior German and US politicians in February 1990 are of particular importance: former US Secretary of State James Baker's proposal to Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev of "assurances that NATO's jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position," and former West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher's commitment to a "non-expansion of NATO." According to Tim Geiger of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, however, these words should not be taken out of context. Writing on behalf of the German Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr, Geiger argues that Baker's and Genscher's suggestions merely serve to demonstrate the lengths to which the West German foreign ministry was willing to go at the time to accommodate Soviet concerns regarding German reunification, but had never constituted German or American foreign policy. Indeed, he points out that, within two months, both US President George H. W. Bush and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had dismissed the ideas as unworkable since they contravened a country's right of freedom to select alliances. This argument is also made by Jim Townsend, senior fellow at the CNAS Transatlantic Security Program, who worked both for and with NATO in various roles throughout the 1990s. "It was all about Germany and German unification," he told DW. Gorbachev himself confirmed as much in an October 2014 interview in which he stated: "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all … Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn't bring it up, either." But that's not enough for Joshua Shifrinson, associate professor of international politics at the University of Maryland, who told DW that Gorbachev's apparent rejection of Putin's theory has also been taken out of context. Indeed, the former Soviet president also said in the same 2014 interview that the first eastward expansion of NATO in the 1990s was "a big mistake from the very beginning," and "definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990." Among the sources analyzed by Shifrinson are the previously classified minutes of a meeting of the chief US, British, French and German ambassadors to NATO in March 1991, also reported by , in which the German representative Jürgen Chrobog said: "We had made it clear during the Two Plus Four negotiations that we would not extend NATO beyond the [River] Elbe. We could not therefore offer membership of NATO to Poland and the others." According to the minutes of the meeting, photos of which DW has also seen, none of Chrobog's colleagues objected. Indeed, France's Raymond Seitz even added: "We had made it clear to the Soviet Union — in Two Plus Four and in other exchanges — that we would not take advantage of the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe." For Shifrinson, this is proof that NATO had not just committed to keeping foreign troops out of eastern Germany, but that "people were thinking about the future of Eastern Europe in general." Benjamin Friedman, who also analyzes relations between Russia and NATO for the US think tank Defense Priorities, added: "The United States didn't make some solemn promise that we would never expand NATO, but we certainly gave the Russians that impression and I think that upset them." Regardless of the ongoing debate, said Shifrinson, "it's incontrovertibly true that Russia invaded Ukraine. You can acknowledge that assurances were given and later abrogated and still not justify Russian behavior." "The expansion or prospect of expansion [of NATO] to Ukraine was a huge cause, not the only one, but a huge cause of the war," said Friedman. "There's a difference between making a statement about causality and a statement about guilt or moral responsibility." Townsend, who after stints at the Pentagon and NATO, moved to the Atlantic Council think tank, also sees Russia as the clear aggressor. "We didn't do anything to upset the Russians, we were very careful about that, and they gave us the green light during those days," he said. "It wasn't until Putin's speech that he gave at the Munich Security Conference that they suddenly had a problem." If NATO has made any mistake, in Townsend's mind, it's a very different one. "If there was any kind of actions that NATO took, [that might have destabilized the European security architecture], it was by not getting strong enough."
DW
6 days ago
- Politics
- DW
Fact check: Viral US Iran strikes videos are fake or old – DW – 06/24/2025
After massive US strikes on Iran's nuclear sites, false claims and fake videos are spreading fast online. DW Fact Check investigates a couple of viral AI cases. In an escalation late on June 21, US B-2 Spirit stealth bombers joined Israeli forces in a surprise strike on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, dropping massive bunker-buster bombs on Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan as part of what officials are calling Operation Midnight Hammer. After an 18-hour covert mission, seven B-2s returned to Missouri, prompting the Pentagon to declare the operation a "spectacular military success." On June 23, Tehran launched retaliatory missile strikes against Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. As news of the US strikes spread, social media platforms were quickly flooded with dramatic videos purporting to show the bombings. Many of these, however, are either digitally manipulated or falsely repurposed. DW Fact Check has investigated several of the viral clips. Claim: "US missile hits Iran," wrote one TikTok user on a video that shows a massive explosion near or inside a city, with a mushroom-shaped cloud of smoke rising into the sky. Other versions of the same video have appeared across platforms like X and YouTube, reaching millions of users in different languages. DW Fact Check: Fake The video is generated with artificial intelligence, and has no connection to the actual US strike on nuclear sites in Iran. The earliest known source of the clip is a social media account that clearly states in its description that all of its content is AI-generated. A reverse image search of key frames shows the footage appeared online several days before the operation, with some posts then falsely claiming it depicted an Iranian missile strike on Israel. There are multiple visual indicators that the video is not authentic. The glow from the explosion, for instance, fails to cast realistic light or reflections on nearby buildings or smoke. The urban layout features Soviet-style buildings, which are uncharacteristic of Iranian cities. Moreover, none of Iran's nuclear facilities targeted in the strike are located near large urban centers like the one depicted here. Claim: This video, which shows a massive pile of smoke allegedly rising from a nuclear site bombed by the US, has been shared on several platforms including TikTok, where a user has added the watermark "Good morning Iran from the B-2 Spirit." The video opens on a village road surrounded by dense greenery, then tilts upward to reveal a towering column of smoke. DW Fact Check: False This footage is not related to any military activity. It shows a volcanic eruption in Indonesia. A reverse image search confirms the video first appeared online last week, and was part of broader coverage of the eruption. Numerous photos and videos of the same volcanic event can be found online. The landscape is another giveaway. The road is bordered by tropical forest and the scene has nothing in common with the semi-arid, desert-like surroundings of Iran's nuclear facilities. Claim: Footage circulating on TikTok and YouTube on Monday morning claims to show an American B-2 stealth bomber being shot down over Iran during the US bombing raid on the Iranian nuclear facility at Fordo over the weekend. The video accrued over 70,000 views on a TikTok channel that has posted a dozen other clearly AI-generated videos before being deleted. DW Fact Check: False Both the footage and the claim are fake. Aside from the fact that the Pentagon officially confirmed on Sunday that all seven B-2s and their crews had returned safely, with major international news outlets including the BBC, CBS and The Associated Press carrying footage of their return, there are several aspects of the social media video which reveal it to be manipulated. A reverse image search for various screenshots revealed that the same footage had earlier been uploaded to a YouTube channel along with the claim: "Iran shoots down US B-2 plane." A disclaimer, points out that the content is "altered or synthetic." Other reverse image search results lead to a different video in which the zig-zagging flightpath taken by an anti-aircraft missile appears to be identical to that taken by the missile in the original video. This video featured a disclaimer pointing out: "This video is gaming footage, just for fun." Indeed, a closer look at the original frames suggests that the air-defense system firing the missile is positioned on animated terrain and in a landscape which doesn't reflect the reality of what we know about the raid on Fordo. That raid took place in a mountainous location, not a grassy field, in the middle of the night, local time, not during daylight. Claim: Several videos have also been circulating on social media claiming to show the US strikes on Fordo or their aftermath, including here (1.5m views).DW Fact Check: False The video is real but has been taken out of context, and actually shows the aftermath of Israeli airstrikes on an oil depot in Shahran on the northern edge of Tehran earlier in June. The facility can be geolocated using the two large pylons visible both in the video and on Google Earth. Furthermore, given the nature of the strike using 13,000-kilogram (30,000-pound) GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bombs, which are designed to penetrate up to 18 meters into concrete or 61 meters into normal earth before exploding on a delayed fuse, it is unlikely that a major explosion such as those depicted in the videos would even have been visible, even if there was footage.
DW
13-06-2025
- Politics
- DW
Fact check: Many viral fakes after Israel's attack on Iran – DW – 06/13/2025
After Israel's June 13 strike on Iran, many viral videos and images on social media claim to show the latest escalation between the two countries. But not everything is authentic — DW Fact Check takes a closer look. In the early hours of June 13, Israel launched a massive strike on different targets in Iran— primarily military and nuclear facilities as well as high-ranking officers and scientists. Following these strikes, many images purporting to show Israel's attack or Iran's counterattack have been shared on social media. DW Fact Check took a closer look. Alleged s ites of Israeli missile attacks Claim: A viral video on TikTok with over 660,000 views at the time of publication claims to show the Iranian sites hit and destroyed by Israeli attacks on June 13. This viral TikTok video was created by Artificial Intelligence Image: tik tok DW Fact Check: Fake All scenes in the video are AI-generated. If you look closely, you can spot several odd things. For example, in the first frame of the scene with the burned-out cars (00:08), the teddy bear has a distorted face and appears unnaturally clean compared to its surroundings. These inconsistencies strongly suggest the use of AI in the video's creation. In the scene at the burning airfield (00:24), the firefighters on one side of the pit remain completely still, while those on the other seem to vanish into thin air. Additionally, the rocket debris in the pit features two arrowheads. Looking closely, some details in the video reveal it is not real Image: tik tok A closer look at the account behind the video, Malka.415, reveals the owner is heavily involved in creating AI-generated videos based on current news events for their channel. Does this video show the Israeli attack? Claim: Several widely shared posts on X, including this one , claim the video shows incoming Israeli missiles targeting Iran. Others assert it depicts Iran's response to Israel. Image: X DW Fact Check: False The video does not depict the current escalation between Israel and Iran. A reverse image search of a still frame confirms that the footage was first shared eight months ago. It most likely shows an Iranian missile attack on Israel in October 2024, which was in retaliation to a prior Israeli strike. This is also indicated in the community notes attached to some of the posts, such as this one . This case highlights how old footage is repeatedly recycled to garner attention and spread misinformation. The same video, for example, was previously posted — and debunked here — in the context of the recent Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan. Apparent counterattacks from Iran Claim: An image on X , viewed 3.6 million times at the time of writing, allegedly shows that "Iran has launched missiles at Israel," as stated in the caption. Image: X DW Fact check: False While Iran responded to Friday's attacks by launching drones, there have been no official statements confirming missile launches. If missiles had been launched, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) would likely have issued a statement. A reverse image search reveals the photo in the post is from a military exercise in Iran several years ago. The image first appeared online in 2021. The photograph appears to have been taken in southern Iran during the 17th Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) joint Great Prophet 17 exercise in December 2021, which included the launch of rockets and missiles as part of a five-day military drill. Given the similar images from this exercise circulating online, taken by different photographers at slightly different times, it is clear the photo is real but unrelated to the current conflict. Edited by: Ines Eisele
