Google didn’t confirm US moon landing was fake

An Instagram video featuring Russian President Vladimir Putin recycles the consistently debunked conspiracy theory that the 1969 U.S. moon landing was fake. 

In the clip, a robotic narrator speaks as the video shows Putin looking at a screen showing photos of astronauts on the moon.

“Google presents its latest artificial intelligence to Vladimir Putin, and explains that basically this artificial intelligence can analyze any video to determine if it’s fake or not,” the voice says. When asked which video to verify, Putin chose the moon landing, according to the clip, and “it turns out,” the voice exclaims, “Google’s AI concluded that this video was fake” perplexing Google’s staff and Putin. 

The narrator then claims that NASA released a statement admitting that the video is fake because they “lost the original.” Text superimposed on the video read: “Google proves that no one ever went to the moon.”

The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

First, the moon landing was real. The Apollo 11 spaceflight landed at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the moon.

Google has never proved otherwise — nor does the company claim that it has.

Google’s press office told PolitiFact in a statement that Google’s AI did not discover that the footage from the moon landing was fake. And Google was not involved in the Russia demonstration depicted in the post’s video, the statement said. 

The video clip of Putin comes from “Artificial Intelligence Journey 2023, a November conference organized by a Russian state-owned banking and financial services company, Sberbank, according to the Kremlin’s website.

Russian television station REN TV reported that the head of Sberbank’s data research department, Nikolai Gerasimenko, claimed he had analyzed a photo of the 1969 American moon landing with the help of Google’s neural network. Gerasimenko said the network found that the image could be fabricated or manipulated.

“Here, their neural network marks in red those places that it considers fake,” the Russian TV report quoted Gerasimenko as saying. “That is, almost all the objects in this photo seem unreal to it. At the same time, the photograph of the Chinese lunar rover does not raise any special questions.”

The report said neither which program Gerasimenko used, nor which photo was evaluated. There is also no evidence Putin was told that “Google’s AI” found that the entire American moon landing was fake. And, even if an AI program shows inconsistencies in an image, these tools aren’t always reliable.

PolitiFact contacted NASA for comment but did not hear back by publication.

And it was about 15 years ago — not recently, as the post claims — when NASA released restored copies of the Apollo 11 moonwalk after announcing years earlier that the original recordings were mistakenly erased and reused.

NASA’s original recordings of the moon landing were accidentally part of a batch of about 200,000 tapes that were magnetically erased and reused to save money in the mid-2000s, Reuters reported in 2009. NASA eventually found good copies in news archives and some recordings in film vaults at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, which were digitized with other pieces to make new renderings. 

We rate this claim False. 

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