Zambian music star Elton Mulenga popularly known as Yo Maps has distanced himself and his brand from the video.
This video on Facebook purportedly of the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC) broadcast claiming that Zambian musician Elton Mulenga popularly known as Yo Maps has developed a new mobile application has been altered.
The video starts off with the artist speaking, then cuts to montages of the application and a couple that has benefitted from the application. The artist supposedly claims that the application was created to benefit the whole of Zambia for supporting his career.
The text in the lower-thirds reads: “Yo Maps’s New App takes Zambians by storm” and “Thousands join the fun!”.
However, there are no reports of such an app. Further, upon examining the video and comparing it to an interview done by the artist in the past, it is clear that the voice had been altered to include a foreign accent.
This prompted further investigation into the video.
A reverse search of a screenshot from the video revealed that the footage of the artist was taken from an interview he had on Diamond TV on a program called Upvile Squad.
Additionally, we reached out to MacPherson Mukuka, a news writer and sub-editor at ZNBC, who called the video in question a fake.
“TV2 Computer Graphics doesn’t have those big crawlers(text display). The voices are AI-generated and our logo is TV1 for Live Broadcast and TV2 for others, and it is always on the top right corner. The logo in the circulating clip is typically used on social media posts as a watermark,” noted Mukuka.
We also reached out to Yo Maps via phone call to inquire about the clip and application. In his response, the musician distanced himself and his brand from the video and also pointed out a similar video claimed to be of Malaza Kaira popularly known as Macky 2 also promoting the app which the latter flagged as fake.
This fact-check was produced by Bloggers of Zambia, under the African Fact-Checking Incubator programme, with support from PesaCheck, Code for Africa’s fact-checking initiative, and the African Fact-Checking Alliance(AFCA).
