World Cup Insight

Hoaxes, lies and doctored pictures are a plague of the modern internet, so why would the World Cup be any different? See how many of these hoaxes from Russia 2018 you recognise. It’s flying home Within days of the World Cup kick off, “it’s coming home” had gone from a catchy chorus in a song from the 90s to the inescapable sound of the summer: bellowed at every England game and whispered between fans as an informal greeting. When the RAF celebrated its 100th anniversary with a flyover of jets the day before England faced Croatia, a video appeared online showing dozens of Spitfires spelling the catchphrase of the competition in a formation over London. Hundreds of people shared it across Twitter and Facebook. Graphics and animation studio Potion Pictures waited a few days – and a few thousand retweets – before showing everyone exactly how they had faked it. Many were fooled by our manipulated RAF100 flyby video, here's our breakdown showing exactly how we manipul...

According to some reports, piracy of the final stages of soccer's World Cup in Russia thrived on social media. VFT found 2,637 pirate streams of the July 10 and 11 semifinals on Facebook, YouTube and Periscope, with close to 30 million views, and 3,653 streams of the France-Croatia final, with more than 60 million views. Social media platforms for live streaming are now the prevalent channel on which to watch pirated content of live events, including sports. Irdeto manually tracked pirate live streams of the same World Cup semifinals and finals on Facebook, YouTube, Periscope, Twitch and other pirate sites. Of the total sample of 1,055 streams, 70% of them were on social media platforms. For the whole tournament, Irdeto tracked 9,430 streams, and 79% of them were on social media platforms. Regulations against piracy require copyright owners to send notices to websites, asking them to take down videos that are not compliant with copyright. Increasingly, content owners collabo...