X is drowning in misinformation after the US and Israeli attack on Iran

Minutes after Donald Trump announced that the US and Israeli governments had launched a “major combat operation” against Iran in the early hours of Saturday morning, and was flooded with disinformation about the attack and Tehran’s response.

WIRED reviewed hundreds of posts on X, some with millions of views, that promoted misleading claims about the locations and scale of the attack.

Elon Musk’s social media platform is a verifiable mess: In some cases, alleged video footage of the attack shared in posts on X is months or years old. In several posts, video footage of the apparent attacks was attributed to incorrect locations. A number of images shared on X appear to have been edited or created using artificial intelligence. Other publications try to pass off video game clips as scenes of conflict.

X did not respond to a request for comment. Under Musk’s watch, X has become a haven for misinformation, especially during major global news events. At the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas, and more recently during the anti-immigration enforcement protests in Los Angeles, the platform was flooded with inaccurate and flawed posts.

Almost all of the most viral posts reviewed by WIRED on Saturday came from accounts with blue check marks, meaning they pay While some of the misinformation posts had a community note appended below them to correct the record, they remain on the site, and it’s not clear how many people saw them before the feedback appeared.

One video posted by an account with a blue check mark allegedly shows ballistic missiles over Dubai; The clip actually showed Iranian ballistic missiles fired at Tel Aviv in October 2024. The post has been viewed more than 4.4 million times.

One of the most viral clips shared on X in the hours following the attack shows an Israeli fighter jet being shot down by Iranian air defense systems. The video has been shared by dozens of accounts, including one post that has been viewed more than 3.5 million times. The source of the video is unclear, but there were no credible reports of any Israeli aircraft being shot down over Iran on Saturday.

Another account claiming to be an open source intelligence expert posted a video showing explosions, along with the caption: “6 Iranian hypersonic missiles hit the Israeli port of Haifa, in which India invests. Serious damage has been reported.” The video has been viewed 64,000 times, but the footage was actually taken last July and shows an Israeli attack on the Ministry of Defense in Damascus, Syria.

In a number of cases, pro-Iranian accounts used images and footage from Saturday’s attacks to falsely claim successful strikes against Israel. “The impact of the Iranian missile is in Tel Aviv now,” the Iran Observer account wrote in a post that included a photo of Dubai. The post was viewed more than 200,000 times before it was deleted, but dozens of other posts sharing the same photo and making the same claims remain on X.

The Tehran Times, a news outlet allied with the Iranian government, published what appears to be an AI-generated image on X that it claims shows that “a US radar in Qatar was completely destroyed today in an Iranian drone strike.” The use of AI-generated images was flagged on X by Tal Hagin, a senior analyst at open source intelligence firm Golden Owl. While there are reports that drone and missile attacks targeted the headquarters of the US Navy’s 5th Fleet in Bahrain, there are no reports yet of similar successful attacks in Qatar.

A pro-Trump account, which also features a blue checkmark, posted photos claiming to show before-and-after photos of the palace of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, which was targeted during the missile attacks on Saturday. (In a post on Truth Social, Trump claimed that Khamenei was killed in an attack.) While the next photo accurately shows the palace after the attack, the previous photo shows the Mausoleum of Ruhollah Khomeini, which is located on the other side of Tehran. The post has been viewed 365,000 times.