Swarms of fake and misleading content interrupted the global rush of condolences that poured online for the 88-year-old Argentine reformer ahead of his funeral Saturday.
“The tragedy of disinformation is that it discredits others, presenting them as enemies, to the point of demonizing them and fomenting conflict,“ Pope Francis wrote in a 2018 message for World Communications Day. He likened modern-day “fake news” to the “snake-tactics” employed by the serpent in the Christian origin story described in the Bible.
Two years earlier, the pope had found himself an unwilling yet central character in one of the most prominent lies of the 2016 US presidential election, when a hoax saying he endorsed Donald Trump exploded online. The false story garnered the most engagement on Facebook of any election story in the three months before the vote, BuzzFeed News reported at the time.
One widespread video appeared to show him swatting the hand of President Trump, whose deportation policies the pontiff had denounced. The clip was manipulated, however, and had originally aired as a joke on a comedian’s late-night TV show.
In a third case, a photo of the pope meeting Holocaust survivors in 2014 was misrepresented as evidence that he was beholden to the wealthy Rothschild family, a favorite target of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
The rash of disinformation underscores how bad actors seeking to farm engagement or push targeted narratives work to exploit the buzz around major events.
“In general, content follows attention,“ digital literacy expert Mike Caulfield, the author of a book about verifying information online, told AFP.
Numerous images generated by artificial intelligence -- including an AI creation of Pope Francis draped in a rainbow LGBTQ Pride flag, and the now-infamous depiction of him wearing a white puffer coat that became an internet sensation in 2023 -- also resurfaced after his death.
Some AI-enabled images circulated alongside malicious links that led to scams or fraudulent websites, according to research from Check Point, a cybersecurity company.
The message became one of his final warnings about disinformation.
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