Fake News Is More Than 3,000 Years Old: Ten True Stories

Fake news is more than 3,000 years old. This film follows ten true stories of lies that spread, from a pharaoh's carved wall in 1274 BC to a deepfake video call in 2024, and shows what has changed and what has not. In every story we ask the same questions: who says so? Who else says so? Where did it start? At the end there are four simple moves you can use today: stop, investigate the source, find better coverage, and trace a claim back to where it started. Some of these stories are still debated by historians. When that is the case, the film says so on screen. The main sources are listed below. Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 0:50 Chapter 1: Carved in stone 2:30 Chapter 2: Coins and a will 3:50 Chapter 3: A forgery that fools popes 5:55 Chapter 4: The statue that talks 7:15 Chapter 5: Men on the Moon 8:42 Chapter 6: The man who vanished 10:00 Chapter 7: The panic that wasn't 11:02 Chapter 8: A lie with a plan 12:35 Chapter 9: The click 14:12 Chapter 10: The perfect fake 16:07 Chapter 11: Four questions Sources: Ch. 1: J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, vol. III (1906) https://archive.org/details/cu3192408... Ch. 1: United Nations, replica of the Egyptian-Hittite peace treaty https://www.un.org/ungifts/replica-pe... Ch. 2: Plutarch, Antony, and Cassius Dio, book 50 (Loeb editions on LacusCurtius) https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/... Ch. 3: C. B. Coleman, The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine (1922) https://archive.org/details/treatiseo... Ch. 3: J. Fried, Donation of Constantine and Constitutum Constantini (De Gruyter, 2007) https://archive.org/details/oapen-20.... Ch. 4: Paolo Giovio, Vita di Adriano VI (16th-century Italian translation) https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_2H... Ch. 4: Treccani, Pasquino https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/... Ch. 5: The Moon Hoax, 1859 reprint of the Sun articles of 1835 https://archive.org/download/moonhoax... Ch. 5: Museum of Hoaxes, The Great Moon Hoax https://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/... Ch. 6: Newseum ED, Photographic Lies in Stalin's Russia https://newseumed.org/tools/artifact/... Ch. 6: Archivio Luce, Chi siamo https://www.archivioluce.com/chi-siamo/ Ch. 7: J. Pooley and M. J. Socolow, Slate, 28 October 2013 https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/ors... Ch. 7: Rockefeller Archive Center, the War of the Worlds broadcast https://resource.rockarch.org/story/w... Ch. 8: T. Boghardt, Operation INFEKTION, Studies in Intelligence 53(4), 2009 https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/sta... Ch. 9: S. Vosoughi, D. Roy and S. Aral, The spread of true and false news online, Science 359 (2018) https://politics.media.mit.edu/papers... Ch. 9: S. Subramanian, Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex, WIRED, 15 February 2017 https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-m... Ch. 10: R. Chesney and D. Citron, Deep Fakes, California Law Review (2019) https://www.californialawreview.org/p... Ch. 10: K. Magramo, CNN, 16 May 2024 https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/16/te... Ch. 11: M. Caulfield, SIFT (The Four Moves), hapgood.us, 19 June 2019 https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-th... The pictures are drawn by code, frame by frame. The narration is a synthetic voice.