Terrified onlookers crouch behind a wall as lights streak across the night sky, in what self-proclaimed digital investigators claimed was footage of Iranian drones over Israel. But the video is months old, repurposed to sow misinformation.
Social media sites such as X, formerly Twitter, were swamped with misrepresented visuals after Iran launched an unprecedented wave of drones and missiles toward Israel at the weekend, exacerbating Middle East tensions during an ongoing war that has already seen a flood of misinformation.
Many of the falsehoods about the Iranian strikes were amplified by what researchers identified as accounts posing as "OSINT" — or open-source intelligence — investigators, feigning digital expertise to further blur the distinction between fact and fiction.