Original article (in BCS) was published on 13/12/2023; Author: Nerma Šehović
Several related accounts and social media pages promoting Russian propaganda narratives published the incorrect information that Putin was told that the first moon landing was faked and that it was “discovered by Google”.
Via e-mail, readers pointed out to us an Instagram account called Pepo politika, which regularly publishes “news” about global politics in the form of pictures. They also sent us several posts from this account so that we could check their factual basis.
One of them is a post from November 24, which claims that “Putin was told that the moon landing was a lie”.
The description states:
Google revealed that the American landing on the moon was a lie!
The American neural network has concluded that the photo of the American landing on the moon is a forgery. This information was communicated to the President of Russia Vladimir Putin at the exhibition held as part of the conference “Journey to the World of Artificial Intelligence”.
The head of the data research department of “Sberbank” Nikolay Gerasimenko spoke about the experience of working with the neural network of the American company “Google”, which the researchers proposed to analyze the photo of the American lunar mission. The first man of “Sberbank”, German Gref, emphasized that such conclusions were made by the American, not the Russian, neural network, based on many parameters.
“Interesting”, commented Putin enigmatically, who was presented with the “Sberbank” program for identifying fake photos and videos.
The same post was also shared on the Pepo politika Facebook page, and these claims were also shared by other users of social networks (1, 2).
What is Pepo politika?
On Facebook, Pepo politika is presented as a media/news outlet. According to data from the “Transparency of the site” section, it was created in 2021 and has two administrators in Serbia. In addition to Facebook and Instagram pages, where mostly identical content is published, Pepo politika has channels on Telegram, TikTok and X profiles, as well as a YouTube channel. Together, they have over 125,000 followers on these social networks. The biggest number of followers, about 54,000, Pepo politika has on Instagram. In the videos on YouTube, a certain Petar Popovic introduces himself as the editor of the Pepo web portal. This portal or website where the content is published, however, does not exist. With a Google search, we could not find any information about Petar Popovic, except for his accounts on social networks. The content published on Pepo politika accounts deals with global and regional politics. Information related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, sanctions against Russia and the BRICS alliance, as well as events in Serbia and Kosovo, are often published. Russia and its president Vladimir Putin are presented almost exclusively in a positive light, and many posts are permeated by already well-known Russian propaganda narratives, which Raskrinkavanje has already written about in several analyses, which you can find here.
Conspiracy theory about the first moon landing
In 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin became the first people to set foot on the moon as part of the American space mission “Apollo 11”. As part of the Apollo program, American astronauts landed on the moon several more times until 1972. It was an unprecedented achievement, which very quickly became the target of conspiracy theorists. The conspiracy theory that the American moon landing was faked is still popular today.
As explained in a 2019 BBC article in Serbian, “conspiracy” claims about the moon landing began to spread significantly in 1976 when journalist Bill Kaysing published a book called “We’ve Never Been to the Moon: An American Hoax Worth Thirty Billion Dollars”. The claims made in this book are still used as arguments to deny the US landing on the moon.
However, the “hardest evidence” for this conspiracy theory, such as the one about the allegedly fake footprints of the astronauts and the fact that the stars are not visible in the photos, has been disproved many times until now. You can read more about it in the BBC article, as well as in Raskrinkavanje’s analyzes available here and here. The BBC article in Serbian explains:
It is worth mentioning here that among the photos taken by the Lunar Orbital Explorer (LRO) and published by NASA, they found newer photos of all the landing sites of the Apollo missions.
Images taken by a probe orbiting the moon since 2009 provide solid evidence that there actually was a moon landing.
Among the photos is a picture of the place where the Apollo 11 mission landed. In this photo, you can clearly see the traces left on the ground, as well as the lunar module.
LRO also shows that the flags placed during the six missions are still standing on the moon – the probe registered their shadows on the surface.
(…)
Although these conspiracy theories have been disproved – they are still very popular and widespread.
But the truth is that there is enough scientific evidence to confirm that on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong really walked on the moon.
One question that is often asked of conspiracy theorists is: if it was faked, why wouldn’t the Soviet Union, which was in the middle of the Cold War with the USA, and was itself involved in a secret program to send people to the moon, get involved in this whole hoax?
“If we really didn’t land on the moon and if we were faking the whole thing, the Soviets had both the ability and the desire to disprove it”, argued Robert Launius, a former NASA chief historian.
“And they never said a word. That’s a pretty strong argument for me”, he says.
So there is a lot of evidence that American astronauts were on the moon on several occasions between 1969 and 1972, despite all the “conspiracy” claims that try to disprove it.
What was told to Putin?
In posts on the Facebook and Instagram pages of Pepo politika, it is claimed that “Putin was told that the moon landing was a lie” and that “Google discovered that the American moon landing was a lie”.
On November 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited a conference organized by Sberbank called Artificial Intelligence Journey 2023. During the conference, according to Russian REN TV from November 24, the head of Sberbank’s Data Research Department, Nikolai Gerasimenko, presented to Putin his findings of a photo of the American moon landing from 1969, which he claims he analyzed with the help of Google’s neural network. Google’s AI technology, he claims, pointed out to him that the photo could be fabricated or manipulated.
More precisely, Gerasimenko, according to the REN TV report, said:
“Here are neural red marks in places that it [the AI program] considers fake. That is, almost all the objects in this photo seem fake to it. At the same time, the photo of the Chinese lunar rover does not raise any special questions”, he drew the attention of the Russian president.
It is not specified exactly which program Gerasimenko used and how he came to the results that he presented to Putin, but it is quite clear that he did not tell him that the “American moon landing was a lie” nor that “Google discovered it”. Garasimenko said that he used Google’s neural network to analyze the photo and that the AI program used “thinks” that parts of the photo have been manipulated. Such results are not definitive proof that the landing was faked, given that AI tools, both those for analyzing photos and those with other functions, are not always reliable (1, 2,).
Given all the facts, we consider the claim that Putin was “informed that the moon landing was a lie” and that it was “revealed by Google” a manipulation of the facts.