Fake story that DiCaprio donated $10 million to Ukraine spreads around the world

A false story that the actor Leonardo DiCaprio made a $10 million donation to Ukraine was repeated this week by media outlets around the world and shared by tens of thousands of people on social media.

Articles and social media posts claimed that DiCaprio is connected to the Ukraine because his late maternal grandmother was born in the Ukrainian city of Odessa. Some of the articles claimed that DiCaprio’s $10 million donation was announced by an organization called the Visegrad International Fund.

Fact verification: DiCaprio has not made a $10 million donation to Ukraine and does not have a family member from Odessa or elsewhere in Ukraine, he told reporters on Wednesday. CNNa source close to the actor.

The source said that DiCaprio “supports Ukraine” and has made Ukraine-related humanitarian donations to CARE, the International Rescue Committee, Save the Children and the UN refugee agency – but that the $10 million sum is false, that claims of DiCaprio giving money to the Ukrainian government or the Ukrainian military are also false, and that claims that DiCaprio has any “family ties” to Ukraine are also falses.

The Visegrad International Fund told CNN on Wednesday that, contrary to the news, it has not announced a $10 million donation from DiCaprio to Ukraine and has no related information.

So how did this fake story spread so far?

The saga of the non-existent $10 million donation is a case study of how bad information can spill over from the margins of the online into mainstream media – with media after media, large or small, simply repeating history without checking it. it independently.

A poorly done story

On Saturday, an obscure website called GSA News, which focuses on news about the South American country of Guyana, ran a short article claiming that “sources within Ukraine” said DiCaprio “transferred ten million dollars to the Ukrainian government.” . He added that DiCaprio “has Ukrainian roots through his maternal grandmother.”

GSA News founder Patrick Carpen backed the article Wednesday afternoon, even after being told that a source close to DiCaprio had told CNN its content was false. Carpen said in an email to CNN: “I really trust my source inside Ukraine.”

On Wednesday night, however, Carpen called CNN to say, “I deeply apologize” for the false story, that he “had no ill intentions in publishing this article” and that he was going to publish a retraction, which he did further. afternoon.

Carpen explained that his main source for DiCaprio’s alleged $10 million donation was a Facebook post by a Ukrainian woman whose posts about the war with Russia are often accurate. Carpen said she also saw other Ukrainians on Facebook posting about the alleged donation.

Because his Guyana website has few readers, Carpen said, he thought that if he published an article repeating the DiCaprio story and it was wrong, he could delete the article without anyone noticing within days.

“I thought it wouldn’t have much consequences if it was fake,” he said.

Instead, he said he watched in surprise and dismay as the story “snowballed into every news publication in the world, some of them with millions of followers. And it kind of worries me […] for people to just take something at face value and just publish it.”

He acknowledged, however, that he himself had taken the Facebook posts at face value.

To Twitter, then to shady sites, then to mainstream media

Whether because of the GSA News article, the Ukrainians’ Facebook posts, or some other reason, the story about DiCaprio began to spread more widely on Sunday.

A Twitter account called Visegrád 24, which tweets news updates focused on the Visegrad Group countries of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to more than 196,000 followers, made a post – without citing sources – that claimed that “Leonardo DiCaprio donated 10 million dollars for Ukraine. His maternal grandmother was from Odessa, Ukraine!”

Allegations that DiCaprio’s maternal grandmother Helene Indenbirken was born in Ukraine or, more specifically, Odessa, have been floating around the internet for years. However, these claims were never attributed to a solid source. Indenbirken died in 2008 in Germany, where she lived; it was unclear on Thursday where she was actually born, and the source close to DiCaprio did not say either.

More than 10 thousand retweets

Regardless, Visegrád 24’s post was retweeted over 10,000 times. She was deleted Wednesday afternoon after CNN informed the account that the story about the $10 million donation was false.

“It seems that we ourselves have been victims of a false story. It happens to the best of us!” an account representative said in a message to CNN on Wednesday.

So where did the account get its information? “We saw the story tweeted by several small news accounts, citing an anonymous source,” the rep said.

Main vehicles publish the story

On Monday, the day after Visegrad 24’s tweet was posted, the story really took off.

An article on another shady website, “Polish News,” reported that DiCaprio had “allocated up to $10 million to support Ukraine and did not plan to announce it to the entire world” — but that as of Sunday, the donation had been reported by the Fund. Visegrad International, which is an international donation organization created by the governments of the Visegrad Group countries (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic).

Again, not true. The fund’s public relations manager, Lucia Becová, told CNN in an email on Wednesday that the fund had made no such announcement.

It is possible that Polish News confused the Visegrad International Fund with the Visegrád 24 Twitter account. On Wednesday, the Polish News article was edited to remove the reference to the Visegrad International Fund – and the site did not express strongly. confidence in the rest of the story.

Polish News representative Artur Salamonczyk said via email that if CNN is aware that DiCaprio has not made the $10 million donation, “we will be happy to remove the content.”

By Thursday, he had deleted the article and published another article saying that the report on a $10 million donation from DiCaprio was incorrect. By then, however, the train was already out of control.

News outlets after news outlets have cited Polish News as the main source behind their stories that DiCaprio made a $10 million donation to Ukraine.

News of the $10 million donation was published by – among others – the British The Independent (which eventually amended its story) and The Daily Mail (which deleted its story), India’s The Hindustan Times (whose story remained online until Friday), Novinky in the Czech Republic (which ended up publishing a new story debunking the original), Euronews in France (which eventually altered the story) and, in the US, entertainment website ET Online (which excluded DiCaprio from its story about celebrity donations in Ukraine), as well as conservative political websites The Washington Examiner and The Daily Caller (both of which altered their stories).

CNN began investigating the alleged $10 million donation after Jane Lytvynenko, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, raised questions about the accuracy of the viral story on Twitter on Wednesday.