Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’ll be closing this live page soon - here’s a look at what the team has been covering today.

The artificial intelligence chatbot Grok was wrongly claiming on X that aerial footage of crowds at an anti-Trump protest in Boston on Saturday was from 2017. We’ve broken down why Grok incorrectly came to say it was old and how this claim spread online, explained how we used reverse image searches to help debunk it and consulted with an expert to explain why AI chatbots sometimes “hallucinate”.

Israel's military said it carried out a wave of strikes against Hamas in Gaza yesterday, with both sides accusing each other of breaching the ceasefire deal. Click here to watch our analysis. The team also looked at a video being shared online of a man being brutally beaten and shot several times by masked men in Gaza. Despite being posted on social media yesterday we found - using reverse image search - it was actually more than a year old.

We’ve also verified video showing a huge blast at a chemical plant in China.

The late team is logged in and will be here to verify footage for the newsroom and keep an eye out for new developments in ongoing stories.

BBC Verify Live will be back tomorrow.

Yi Ma and Kumar Malhotra
BBC Verify

Image source, X

We have verified footage showing an enormous fire caused by an explosion at a chemical plant in Jiangyin, a city in China’s eastern Jiangsu province.

In the video posted on X, flames can be seen throwing up huge plumes of smoke into the air.

The clip was filmed from quite far away, but one particular rectangular structure which is visible when the video zooms in matches part of the Chengxing chemical plant complex as seen on Google Earth. A stretch of greenery in the foreground is also identifiable on Google’s satellite imagery.

We also confirmed that the video is new through a reverse image search.

Local district authorities have acknowledged there was an incident at the plant, saying that some phosphorus overflowed and caught fire. They added the blaze was contained after about 50 minutes and testing showed the local area had not been contaminated.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

BBC Verify is dedicated to examining the facts and claims behind a story to try to determine whether or not it is true - whether that’s a political statement, a video shared on social media, or images from a war zone.

And we’re also keen to hear from you - is there something you think we should investigate? We're particularly interested in claims you have heard or seen that maybe don’t seem right.

Or perhaps you’ve come across something online and want to know if it was created using AI or even a deepfake.

You can send your suggestions to the team here.

Israel's military said it carried out a wave of strikes against Hamas on Sunday, with both sides accusing each other of breaching the ceasefire deal.

BBC Verify correspondent Merlyn Thomas has been examining footage of what happened.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’ve been reporting today on how artificial intelligence chatbot Grok falsely claimed on X that aerial footage of crowds at an anti-Trump “No Kings” protest in Boston at the weekend was from 2017.

Huge crowds gathered to protest against President Donald Trump's policies in cities across the US on Saturday - including New York, Washington DC, Boston and Miami.

The No Kings coalition, which organisers say comprises roughly 300 groups, first gained prominence in June with nationwide demonstrations on Trump's birthday that activists said drew millions on to the streets.

Ahead of Saturday’s demonstrations, Republican Party politicians and Trump allies described them as "the hate America rally", while some conservative US governors mobilised the National Guard in preparation.

Organisers said the events drew nearly seven million people and were peaceful.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

If you’re a regular visitor to this page, you’ll often see us talking about reverse image searching - like today in our coverage of protest footage in the US that has been falsely described as being old by X’s AI chatbot Grok.

The concept is simple - a reverse image search is when you upload a photo, or a still from a video, to an online search engine which will check if the image has appeared on the internet before.

If it has, we can then check when a piece of content appeared online and who published it first by going through search results - in some cases hundreds of them.

The platform most people have heard of is Google Lens, but similar features are available on Bing and Yandex, and there are also other dedicated tools.

At BBC Verify, we use multiple platforms for every search because each have their own strengths. Yandex, for example, is very good at searching through pictures posted in Russia. If we’re checking a video, we take multiple frames from the footage and search for them individually.

Reverse image searching is not foolproof. Sometimes old pictures or videos that have appeared on the internet before won’t be listed in the search results and sometimes old footage just hasn't been posted before and so will look new.

That’s why we often do multiple checks on images or videos alongside reverse image searching to be sure of its authenticity.

Kumar Malhotra
BBC Verify senior journalist

Last week we verified footage which emerged on social media showing Hamas carrying out public executions in Gaza City.

The videos showed eight men, who Hamas has claimed were “criminals and collaborators with Israel”, being shot in front of a gathered crowd.

On Sunday, another video was shared showing a shirtless man with his hands bound and eyes covered being dragged along the ground by masked men. The men dragging him are carrying large sticks and what appear to be baseball bats, with several also carrying guns.

In graphic footage that lasts almost two minutes, the man can be seen getting severely beaten and then shot at close range several times. The text accompanying the video, which has gathered more than 700,000 views, says: “This is Gaza. This is Hamas.”

However, a search using a frame of the video reveals that it is at least a year old, posted on X on 3 October 2024. We are not able to verify the identity of the victim or who the armed men are, but our colleagues in the BBC Arabic team say their accents suggest they are from Gaza.

It’s not unusual, particularly with conflicts, to find that old video is posted during recent events. So it’s important for us to check if a video or image is new as one of the first steps in our verification work.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

Image source, PA Media

Earlier on we told you about how the artificial intelligence chatbot Grok - part of Elon Musk’s X platform - falsely claimed that footage of an anti-Trump protest in Boston on Saturday was from 2017.

We’ve asked xAI, the company behind Grok, why it had made these specific claims.

This isn’t the first time Grok has done this - BBC Verify reportedly on a similar incident after recent protests in London.

We asked an expert why AI chatbots will sometimes confidently make stuff up or give us the wrong answers to our questions.

“AIs are trained always to give us useful information; to please us like eager puppy dogs,” says Dr Peter Bentley, who’s an author and computer scientist at University College London.

When they try to answer a question, AI chatbots only have two sources of information - the data they’ve been trained on and what they can find on the internet.

They then use these two sources to generate the most plausible answer to a question.

But when a chatbot is presented with fresh information, like new footage from a protest, “the available data is not enough, or not accurate, for them to get it right and their ‘plausible answer’ is plain wrong,” says Bentley.

Some people call these confident wrong answers "hallucinations".

Fridon Kiria and Thomas Copeland
BBC Monitoring and BBC Verify

Image source, Telegram

We’ve verified footage posted on the Telegram messaging app that shows a fire burning at a coal mine in the town of Ternivka in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region following a reported Russian drone attack yesterday.

By examining satellite imagery on Google Maps of Ternivka, we were able to identify and match several distinctive features of the mine facilities with those visible in the footage on Telegram.

We also conducted a reverse image search of the footage and confirmed it had not appeared online before.The private Ukrainian energy company DTEK confirmed a strike on one of its mines, and said that “192 mine workers were underground” when it happened.

In a later post, external on Sunday, DTEK said: “All DTEK miners were successfully brought to the surface after a large-scale enemy attack. None of the colleagues were harmed.”

The company noted that this was the fourth large-scale enemy attack on DTEK coal enterprises in the last two months.

Benedict Garman
BBC Verify senior journalist

We’re continuing to examine graphic footage emerging from Gaza following the temporary break in the ceasefire yesterday.

After the wave of strikes by Israel, which it says was retaliation for an attack on soldiers by Hamas in southern Gaza, we verified footage of impacts and their aftermath throughout the territory.

One of the first strikes was on a beachside cafe in Az-Zawayda, an area of central Gaza to the north of Deir al-Balah. Verified video showed bloodied people on the ground and being removed on stretchers, including at least two injured children.

A subsequent strike was on a sports field in Nuseirat, also in central Gaza. Videos showed a dismembered body being covered with a sheet and a bloodied child being rushed from the scene.

Multiple videos, filmed from both Gaza and Israel, showed smoke plumes rising over areas east of Khan Younis, around Abasan al-Kabira in the south of Gaza.

Later in the day, we verified footage of the aftermath of a strike behind Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital, as well several videos of injured people arriving to hospitals both in the north and south of the Strip.

There is more video from reported strikes in Bureij, Nuseirat and Az-Zawayda in central Gaza and from Sheikh Radwan in Gaza City. We are still working on corroborating that footage.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

The artificial intelligence chatbot Grok has falsely claimed on X that aerial footage of crowds at an anti-Trump protest in Boston at the weekend was from 2017.

Reverse image searches of multiple frames from the video, which was clipped from an MSNBC broadcast about Saturday’s nationwide “No Kings” demonstrations, indicate that the footage has has only appeared on the internet after the date of the Boston protest.

Similar footage shown by local media outlets features matching signs, tent and stage placement.

Image source, MSNBC

Grok’s false claim, which it made repeatedly, appears to have been sourced from a proposed but unapproved Community Note attached to one post with the video.

Community Notes - a feature on X designed to allow volunteers to add corrections or context to posts - says it was “proposed by an experimental AI contributor” and asks users to vote on whether it is helpful.

The unapproved Community Note lists three links about 2017 protests in Boston, but none support the claim that the aerial footage is old.

Screenshots of Grok’s claim and the unapproved Community Note were shared widely, including by pro-Trump influencers, as evidence of protestors misleading the public about the size of the “No Kings” demonstrations which took place across the US.

Grok eventually corrected its claim - and even began using BBC Verify as a source for its correction after a post on X by one of our team.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Today we’re investigating claims about footage from one of the “No Kings” protests in the US at the weekend.

We’ve seen online posts saying the video is not from an anti-Trump demonstration on Saturday but shows a protest from 2017. However, we have been able to show - using verification techniques - that this isn’t true and the video is genuine.

But the people saying the opposite on social media are using an artificial intelligence chatbot to back up their claims, so we’re looking at how reliable AI is as a verification tool.

BBC Verify’s journalists are also piecing together what happened over the weekend in Gaza after Israel and Hamas accused each other of breaching the ceasefire. We’re verifying video that appears to show where Israel carried out strikes after it accused Hamas of firing towards its troops. Hamas said it was “unaware” of the attacks.

Elsewhere we’re keeping a close eye on the latest from Ukraine and Russia as both sides continue to attack energy infrastructure ahead of winter.

If there’s a story or a viral claim you think BBC Verify might want to investigate do get in touch with us.