Microsoft did not release such a video. The quote from journalist Dhruv Mehrotra, given in the video, is also fabricated.
Propaganda sources claim that Ukrainian fact-checking organizations themselves are allegedly spreading fakes that they debunk. This, they say, is proven by Microsoft’s research: the video, which is being shared by pro-Russian resources, states that as funding for Ukrainian fact-checking organizations by the USAID fund was ceased, the number of fakes allegedly decreased by 12 times. The video also contains a quote from WIRED journalist Dhruv Mehrotra, who compared this to the situation in the 90s, when antivirus software manufacturers themselves created and distributed viruses on the network.
However, this news is not true. First, Microsoft does not have any media resources that would publish news on political topics — their Microsoft News project writes mostly about innovative technologies, artificial intelligence, sustainable development, etc. So it is not surprising that such a video did not appear on the website of this tech giant. The company’s only connection with fact-checking is the recently launched Correction tool, designed to combat the fact that AI generates false content, i.e. the so-called hallucinations. Second, although Dhruv Mehrotra is indeed a journalist working for WIRED, he also did not publish any stories on the topic of Ukrainian fact-checking organizations and USAID — this is easy to verify on his personal page on the WIRED website. Instead, a number of his articles are devoted to Russian propaganda: for example, Mehrotra investigated right-wing radical US YouTube channels that were funded by the Russian state news network, and wrote about cyberattacks by Russian hackers.
Fakes that Ukrainian fact-checking projects refute are deliberately created and spread by the Russian propaganda machine through a network of pro-Kremlin media outlets and so-called troll farms. The recent suspension of funding for USAID programs has become a pretext for a targeted campaign to discredit the foundation’s activities in Ukraine. We have already refuted a similar fake on this topic in the article Fake: USAID Funded the Work of a «Troll Farm» Which Employed Eastern European Students.
