Disinformation Floods X Hours After Announcement of US-Israeli Strike on Iran

Just minutes after Donald Trump made an early Saturday announcement confirming that the United States and Israeli governments had launched a large-scale combat operation against Iran, false claims about the strike and Tehran’s retaliation swept across the social platform X.

Reporters from WIRED have analyzed hundreds of X posts promoting inaccurate claims about where the strikes hit and the scale of the operation, many of which have already accumulated millions of views.

Elon Musk-owned X has become a well-documented hotbed of misinformation during fast-moving global events, and this breaking news cycle was no exception. Many purported attack videos shared on the platform are actually months or even years old, pulled from entirely unrelated incidents. Other clips that supposedly show strike footage have been incorrectly linked to wrong locations. A large share of viral images have been edited or entirely generated with artificial intelligence, while some bad actors have even passed off video game gameplay as real conflict footage.

X did not reply to WIRED’s request for comment on the spread of disinformation. Since Musk took stewardship of the platform, X has turned into a major hub for false content, particularly during fast-developing breaking news events. During the early weeks of the Israel-Hamas war, and more recently during anti-immigration enforcement protests in Los Angeles, the platform was overwhelmed by thousands of inaccurate, misleading posts.

Nearly every one of the highest-traffic viral posts WIRED reviewed on Saturday came from accounts with X’s blue checkmark verification. Blue checks are granted exclusively to paid subscribers of X’s Premium service, which allows creators to earn revenue based on how much engagement their posts receive — even when the content shared is verifiably false. While some disinformation posts eventually get a community note added below to correct the false claim, the posts themselves stay up on the platform, and there is no way to track how many users viewed the misleading content before the correction was added.

One viral video from a blue-check account claimed to show ballistic missiles flying over Dubai. The clip, which has been viewed more than 4.4 million times, actually shows Iranian ballistic missiles launched toward Tel Aviv back in October 2024.

Another of the most viral clips shared in the hours after the strike’s announcement purported to show an Israeli fighter jet being downed by Iranian air defense systems. The video has been reshared by dozens of accounts, with one single post racking up more than 3.5 million views. While the video’s original source remains unconfirmed, there are no credible reports of any Israeli aircraft being shot down over Iranian airspace on Saturday.

An account claiming to be run by an open source intelligence expert shared an explosion clip captioned: “6 Iranian Hypersonic Missiles hit the Indian-invested Israeli Haifa port. Massive damages reported.” The post gained more than 64,000 views, but the footage was actually captured last July and documents an Israeli strike on the Syrian defense ministry building in Damascus.

In many instances, pro-Iranian accounts have repurposed existing footage and images to falsely claim Iran pulled off successful strikes against Israeli targets. The account Iran Observer posted an image of Dubai with the claim: “IRANIAN MISSILE IMPACT IN TEL AVIV RIGHT NOW.” That post was viewed more than 200,000 times before it was removed, but dozens of other posts sharing the same fake claim and image remain live on X.

Tehran Times, a news outlet aligned with the Iranian government, shared what analysts have confirmed is an AI-generated image on X claiming it showed “an American radar in Qatar was completely destroyed today in an Iranian drone strike.” The manipulated image was flagged by Tal Hagin, a senior analyst at open-source intelligence firm Golden Owl. While there are existing reports that drone and missile strikes targeted the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, no credible reports of a successful Iranian strike in Qatar have emerged.

A blue-checkmarked pro-Trump account shared what it claimed were before-and-after photos of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s palace, which was reportedly targeted in Saturday’s missile strikes (Trump himself claimed on Truth Social that Khamenei had been killed in the attack). While the “after” image does accurately show the palace post-strike, the “before” image actually depicts the Mausoleum of Ruhollah Khomeini, located across the city of Tehran from the Supreme Leader’s compound. The post has been viewed more than 365,000 times.