Altered BBC broadcast on Zelensky, using expletive, circulates online

"Amazing things happen when the BBC forgets to cut its reporter's feed while covering the Trump-Zelensky fiasco," says a March 5, 2025 X post with thousands of interactions.

About seven seconds into the video, the BBC's Ukraine correspondent James Waterhouse can be heard saying, "Are you done? Okay. I saw a meme saying this is the second time ever that a US president fucked someone in the Oval Office" after the cameras cut away from him.

Image

Screenshot from X taken March 7, 2025

The same edited footage, suggesting an open mic gaffe, circulated elsewhere on X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, YouTube and Gettr -- including in Russian, Spanish and French.

Social media platforms have seen a surge of disinformation aimed at Ukraine and its president as Kremlin backers attempt to undermine public support for Kyiv.

At a summit hosted by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, European leaders rallied around the Zelensky and promised to assemble a coalition to protect the country during any potential truce.

A spokesperson for the BBC said the clip circulating online has been altered.

"We can confirm the video is fake. We urge everyone to check links and URLs to ensure they are getting news from a trusted source. When we become aware of fake BBC content, we take swift action," a spokesperson said in a March 6 email.

The full video posted on the BBC's YouTube page does not include Waterhouse's supposed comment about Zelensky in the Oval Office (archived here).

Both Waterhouse and BBC disinformation journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh posted responses to the video on X, confirming the broadcast footage had been manipulated (archived here and here).

Hany Farid, the chief science officer at GetReal Labs, a cybersecurity company focused on combating malicious artificial intelligence threats (archived here), analyzed the video's audio using two programs designed to distinguish between human and artificially generated voices.

"Once we separated the audio, we ran the purported fabricated audio through our models. Two of our models classified the audio as likely AI-generated," he said in a March 7 email.

GetReal Lab's investigative team also found that the same clip circulated in several Russian-language Telegram channels at around 0000 GMT on March 5, about five hours before the most-viewed English-language X posts went up.

Siwei Lyu, director of the University at Buffalo's Media Forensics Lab (arrived here), also analyzed the clip and said there is a "high likelihood," or about a 90 percent chance, the edited portion of the clip was AI-generated. He also said he was able to generate a similar voice with the voice generation software ElevenLab.

AFP has debunked other claims about the war in Ukraine here.