It started for Ton van der Ham this summer. “I suddenly received messages from all sides: how bad, people wrote. And: I support you,” says the investigative journalist in the TV program Zembla.
There appeared to be a message going around on Facebook that looked like an interview with it A.Din which Van der Ham complained about opposition from the broadcaster he works for. The headline of the fake article read: “Revelation: Ton van der Ham against BNNVARA – why was the controversial Zembla episode destroyed?” According to the article, “one of the most socially relevant episodes of Zembla”, made by Van der Ham, would never have been broadcast because BNNVARA refused.
The episode of the TV show is said to be about a financial instrument that “professional investors use to achieve super profits.” The revelation that the broadcaster would have put a stop to was that “ordinary people” could also benefit from this. Van der Ham would have tested that and a deposit of 250 euros would have grown to 1,300 euros in a week. But under pressure from banks, insurance companies and asset managers, management began to “censor us”, Van der Ham said. A.D said, and the recordings would have been destroyed.
Returns
All fabrications, the journalist assures us and so does it A.D. Just like the claim in the article that the 500 euros that Van der Ham had invested as a test, according to the article, has now grown to 47,000 euros. The fake article concluded with the journalist’s recommendation to readers to also take their chance on such returns, with a link to the financial platform. Van der Ham received a message from someone that he had actually done that and realized that he had lost that money.
“Even people with some media literacy did not immediately notice that it was fake,” says Van der Ham. He was unable to find out who was behind it. But the fact that he and the program he works for are being used for scams bothers him, especially now that an AI-made video is also circulating on Facebook in which a fairly similar, artificial ‘Van der Ham’ appears in a fake fragment of the NOS Journal tells the same story about the supposedly censored broadcast. “That there is even one now deepfakevideo with fake news makes it a bit creepy.”
There was a message on Facebook that looked like an interview with the AD.
Also science journalist and presenter Anna Gimbrère, from the TV program Pointer (KRO-NCRV), was used for such a fake article that also falsely gave the impression of it A.D to be. Like Van der Ham and BNNVara, she has reported the matter to the police and complained to Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram. She warns on all her social media accounts that it is fake. But the piece keeps popping up. “You report nonsense, but it doesn’t yield anything,” says Gimbrère.
“I don’t do commercial jobs because I want to be credible as a journalist – and then you get this. But I especially feel sorry for the people who fall for it. I am amazed at the cold-bloodedness of those who rob naive people of their money in this way.”
Cryptocurrency
The issue is reminiscent of the way in which advertisements with photos of Jort Kelder and John de Mol, among others, falsely gave the impression that these well-known media figures advised people to invest in cryptocurrency. The difference is that not only is the reputation of well-known journalists being abused, but established media are also involved and made suspicious in a conspiracy theory.
“It is pure deception and undermining the credibility of journalism,” says Thomas Bruning, general secretary of the Dutch Association of Journalists (NVJ). He believes that the social media that spread these types of fake interviews should take more responsibility to prevent their users from being presented with this.
Journalistic titles of the public broadcaster are increasingly the target of deliberate, undermining actions, says Joost Oranje, genre manager of journalism at the public broadcaster, in a response. “That is very disturbing, it affects our public task and damages our journalism. We urgently appeal to the social media platforms to intervene quickly in cases of abuse and, above all, to be easily accessible for reports.”
For editor-in-chief Rennie Rijpma of the A.D it is “a very big frustration,” she says. “Reliability is a great asset for us. This is harmful to us – because something appears under the name of the A.D that is not ours.” The fact that the name of an existing journalist is above the fake article makes it even more annoying. On the home page warns the newspaper: “Beware of advertisements that look like articles on the AD.”
“It is a persistent problem that has existed for years,” says Rijpma, “but new technologies are making it increasingly easier to copy things and more difficult to distinguish between fake and real. It is still easy for journalists to see that these so-called AD pieces have been counterfeited. But for a random reader, this is becoming increasingly difficult to do.”
Report to ACM
The AD has repeatedly asked social media to remove the fake articles from their platform, “but it is a continuous battle, they keep resurfacing. It is a matter of mopping the floor.”
This is also stated by corporate lawyer Bart Priem of BNNVARA, who suspects that “legal entities outside the Netherlands” are behind the fake articles and the incentives to invest money. That makes it difficult to recover. BNNVARA has reported the case to the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM), which must monitor European rules in the Netherlands that require platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to take action against misleading information.
Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was unable to respond before the end of the afternoon today.
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