#Doctored videos online appear to fake the cause of Beirut explosion

Manipulated videos circulating online after the massive explosion in Beirut were made to show a missile striking the Lebanese capital’s port just before the blast.

The footage, which made its rounds on YouTube and Twitter, was doctored to add what appeared to be a cartoonish projectile, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.

The large missile seen in the clips had been superimposed onto the video, the news agency reported.

A negative film effect was used to invert the colors, supposedly revealing a missile striking the site — but when viewing the footage frame by frame, the missile appears bent and has a cartoonish appearance.

As the missile moves closer to the target, its size and the angle don’t change — and it suddenly disappears before getting close to striking anything.

The fake footage has emerged as Lebanese President Michel Aoun on Friday said the investigation into the blast that killed at least 154 people would seek to determine whether a rocket, bomb or other “external interference” had a role in the disaster.

Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who focuses on digital forensics, confirmed to the AP that the missile seen in the video was “obviously fake.”

“In addition, the missile looks far too large to be physically plausible and there is no motion blur on the missile as would be expected given the speed at which it would have been traveling,” Farid told the news outlet.

One YouTube account that posted the clip — which has been viewed more than 348,000 times in less than a day — suggested the blast was the result of an attack.

“The closest explosion angles available online,” reads the caption of the video, which also was shared on Facebook and Twitter, where many believed it was authentic. “You still believe that was an accident!!??”

“It’s basically a cartoon missile that doesn’t look anything like a real missile striking a target,” Jeffrey Lewis, a missile expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, told the AP.

“If it were less amateurish, we could identify the actual missile type, estimate the reentry trajectory and speed, as well as look for digital artifacts,” Lewis added. “But this isn’t good enough to bother with. This is more derp fake than deep fake.”

Some of the doctored video was taken from the Facebook page of Beirut-based CNN Arabic social media producer Mehsen Mekhtfe, who had captured the blast while walking near the port.

“Many people reached out to me to tell me that it’s fake,” Mekhtfe told CNN. “But it’s my video and I have the original and it doesn’t show that. When people ask me about it, I tell them, the doctored one is not true.”

He added: “I can emphasize that I didn’t see any missile and didn’t hear any jet or drone above me.”

The video also showed up on TikTok and Instagram, according to CNN. Some of the videos on Facebook had a “false information” warning.

CNN said it reached out to the various social media companies but only got responses from TikTok and YouTube.

“As soon as we became aware of this video it was removed for violating our policy on misleading content,” a TikTok rep told CNN. “Prior to removal, the video had already been automatically flagged by our system, limiting its reach on our platform. Our hearts go out to the people of Beirut during this difficult time.”

YouTube spokesperson Farshad Shadloo told CNN in an email: “We have removed the video for violating our Community Guidelines and re-uploads of the original clip if they contain segments that we deem to be violative of YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”

CNN reported that when it reached out to the person credited with creating the faked video, the individual responded that “someone or somebody hated me so much to put my email on a fake video.”