Through content published on Facebook by several pages, it is being claimed that retired Croatian general Ante Gotovina spoke about the trial of former Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi in The Hague, saying: "Hashim Thaçi is not on trial, but the KLA is on trial."
The content was found posted on Facebook by the pages "TV Arbëria","vox24.net","Found info"and "Skenderaj.info".
What's wrong with this content?
After fact-checking conducted by hibrid.info, it was confirmed that the footage used in this content is from August 5, 2020, when Gotovina gave a speech in Knin on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the military-police operation "Storm".
His speech was published and reported by several Croatian sources, including HRT and other media (see here and here).
In the original speech, Gotovina spoke about Operation Storm, the Croatian army, war victims, and the building of a democratic Croatia. The text of the speech published by Croatian sources does not contain any mention of Hashim Thaçi or the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) (see here and here).
Likewise, a search of credible sources in Croatian and English has not found any evidence that Gotovina made the statement attributed to him (see here and here).
Furthermore, analysis of the audio of the videos published by the aforementioned sites shows that 63.5% of the audio was generated by artificial intelligence. This was confirmed after checking through automated software. HiveModeration.com (see photo below).
Based on this data, the statement “Hashim Thaçi is not on trial, but the KLA is on trial” was not made by Ante Gotovina in his 2020 speech and there is no credible evidence that he ever made this statement. Also, the audio in this video is generated through AI.
Analyze
A piece of content published on Facebook claims that retired Croatian general Ante Gotovina commented on the trial of Hashim Thaçi in The Hague, presenting it as a statement in support of the KLA.
However, the facts show that the footage used is from Gotovina's speech in Knin, on August 5, 2020, on the 25th anniversary of Operation Storm. In the original version of the speech, published by HRT and Index.hr, there is no reference to Hashim Thaçi or the KLA. Also, a search of credible Croatian and English sources has found no evidence that Gotovina ever made the statement attributed to him.
Analysis of audio content published on Facebook has shown that 63.5% of it was generated with artificial intelligence. Thus, the content uses real footage of Gotovina from 2020, but accompanies it with AI-generated audio and a statement that he never made.
Based on its work methodology, hibrid.info assesses this content as "Fraud".
rationale
The “Deception” rating is given to informational content that is manipulated in terms of visual (deepfake, cheapfake), audio, or textual content to deceive the audience. This form of deception is usually used to produce false and manipulated content.