Al Jazeera Did Not Report that a Pro-Ukrainian Protester Spit on JD Vance’s Young Daughter
By Macrina Wang
What happened: Pro-Kremlin sources are sharing a doctored video appearing to be from Qatari state-funded news agency Al Jazeera reporting that a pro-Ukrainian protester spit into a stroller carrying U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s 3-year-old daughter.
Context: On March 8, 2025, Vance was confronted by a group of pro-Ukrainian protesters in Cincinnati, Ohio, as he was walking with his daughter in a stroller. Following the incident, Vance criticized the demonstrators in an X post, saying that they followed him and his daughter around and “shouted as my daughter grew increasingly anxious and scared.”
A closer look: The fake video claimed an Al Jazeera employee named “Musa Ali Daoud” used thermography — which is employed to create images and videos showing the temperatures of objects — and “found that one of the activists had discreetly spit from behind JD Vance’s back right into the baby stroller.”
The supposed thermography included in the video, showing the activists in grayscale with blacks and whites inverted, seems to depict a thin streak moving toward Vance’s daughter that is described as spit from an activist.
You can watch the video here:
Actually: The video is digitally manipulated, and there’s no evidence that Al Jazeera issued such a report or that a protester spit on Vance’s daughter.
Neither Vance nor any credible news outlets that reported on the confrontation mentioned anyone spitting at the stroller.
NewsGuard did not find any record of the video on Al Jazeera’s official channels or any record of an Al Jazeera employee named “Musa Ali Daoud.” (NewsGuard sent an email to Al Jazeera seeking comment but did not receive a response.)
The original footage was manipulated to add the supposed spit in the video. The fluid can be seen moving at a higher frame rate than the rest of the video, which could not happen in authentic video footage.
Who’s behind it? The video matches the tactics of Matryoshka, a Russian influence operation that publishes anti-Ukraine content and pro-Kremlin disinformation videos mimicking credible Western media outlets including E! News, the BBC, and CNN, as previously reported in Reality Check.
The video appears to have originated on March 11, 2025, in a Telegram post by pro-Kremlin user @kotreal.
The post said in Russian: “One of the Ukrainian protesters who surrounded Vance last weekend spat in Vance’s daughter’s stroller. This was discovered by an Al Jazeera journalist when he was studying the video of the incident frame by frame. Pigs are pigs… How I understand Russians now! - Vance must have thought.”