Does a video show a real instance of a woman rescuing a white baby reindeer on the side of the road? No, that's not true: The account that first shared the video labeled it as AI content, and Meta flagged it as well. A visual analysis found physical impossibilities -- including antlers passing through a person's body.
The claim appeared in a reel (archived here) reposted on Instagram by the account @prof.dr.osmanmuftuoglu on Oct. 6, 2026. The caption, translated to English from Turkish, opened:
OUR CREATION IS FOUNDED ON LOVE AND COMPASSION... 🤲❤️ AND THE HIGHEST POINT OF LOVE IS THE LOVE BETWEEN PARENTS AND CHILD... 👨 👩 👧 👦💞
This is what a screenshot of the reel looked like on Instagram:
(Image source: reel reposted by @prof.dr.osmanmuftuoglu on Instagram.)
Through video and text, the reel tells the story of a woman confronted by the mother of a white baby reindeer on the side of an unidentified one-way road. The woman realizes the baby reindeer is injured and takes it to her farm. The mother reindeer locates the farm, presumably by following the woman's car. The next day, the woman doesn't find the mother or baby in the barn but finds them just outside it. The video ends by claiming that the woman and the reindeer became a family.
The video is not clearly labeled as containing AI content. However, when a user clicks on the three horizontal dots at the top-right of the reel ("..."), there is an option to click "About this reel." When a user clicks on those words, there is information from Meta suggesting that the reel contains AI content:
(Image source: reel reposted by @prof.dr.osmanmuftuoglu on Instagram.)
As indicated in the bottom left-hand corner of the reel and at the end of the reel's caption, the reel was reposted from the Instagram account @anton.yehorov. The @anton.yehorov account posted the reel on Oct. 5, 2026, and labeled it "AI Content" (archived here). A screenshot of that post is included below:
(Image source: reel posted by @anton.yehorov on Instagram.)
The SynthID Detector tool offered by Google did not detect a SynthID on a 30-second version of the nearly two-minute-long video, as shown below. As explained in the screenshot, this does not automatically mean the video contains real content. Instead, this can occur if the content was "generated by a non-partner organization, or at a time prior to a partner adopting SynthID":
(Image source: SynthID Detector by Google.)
Still, there are also a few visual clues that the reel was created with AI. For example, the video begins with the mother reindeer pinning the woman against a guardrail with its antlers. However, the antlers don't penetrate the woman's body; instead, they seem to pass through it:
(Image source: reel reposted by @prof.dr.osmanmuftuoglu on Instagram. GIF created by Lead Stories.)
Additionally, when the woman places the baby reindeer in her car, the guardrail, which should be in view on the one-way road, has disappeared:
(Image source: reel reposted by @prof.dr.osmanmuftuoglu on Instagram. Red markers added by Lead Stories.)
At the end of the video, the woman runs out of her barn, looking for the baby and mother reindeer. When she finds them, she offers the baby a large bottle of milk from under her coat. However, the milk seems to appear out of nowhere: when she was running before, the bottle was not in sight:
(Image source: reel reposted by @prof.dr.osmanmuftuoglu on Instagram. Red markers added by Lead Stories.)
Many online videos of heartwarming or heartstopping human-animal interactions are created using AI. Lead Stories has prebunked (examples here and here) and debunked (examples here and here) several of these videos.
