On Sunday morning April 14th, just a few hours after the Iranian missile attack against Israel, Jackson Hinkle shared with his 2.6 million followers on X , formerly Twitter, several videos purporting to show the barrage and its impact on Israel. “Don’t mess with Iran,” wrote Hinkle, an American blogger who openly supports the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin and who is considered one of the most prolific disseminators of fake news on the internet. Hinkle, who's followers number has increased fivefold thanks to the barrage of disinformation and anti-Israel posts he has uploaded since the October 7 terrorist attack, did not hold back this time, too. One of his posts shows a panicked crowd of people near a hotel in Buenos Aires – which did not stop Hinkle from claiming that the clip showed Israelis fleeing from the missiles. In another post, he presents what he calls “damage caused by Iranian missiles.” In fact, the video was from a house fire in Rishon Lezion some three years ago.

Under normal circumstances, there would be no good reason to give Hinkle any kind of platform – but he is just one symptom of a much broader phenomenon, whereby many internet users who want reliable and up-to-date information about events in Israel are being exposed to huge quantities of fake news. A Shomrim analysis from the days immediately after the Hamas missile attack shows that, among the viral videos, there were clips from previous conflicts or even from conflicts elsewhere in the world – none of which had anything to do with the current crisis between Israel and Iran. Some of the posts even contained videos created by artificial intelligence computer programs. Some of them are so convincing that even people on the Israeli side have been taken in.

This is what the situation looked like this week.

The Goal: Spreading Panic and Unrest Among Israelis

One of the prominent narratives adopted by the fake news purveyors dealt with how Israeli society responded to the Iranian attack; many of the reports claimed that the Israel public was overcome with panic ahead of the missile barrage. For example, several users shared a video taken in 2018, showing a group of Russian soccer supporters crowded onto the escalators in one of the stations of the Rome Metro system – but claiming that it actually showed panicked Israelis fleeing the country via Ben-Gurion International Airport. This is despite the fact that the audio of the clip clearly depicts the people shown speaking Russian and not Hebrew. Another example was shared by thousands of French users, who uploaded photographs from the time of the coronavirus pandemic, showing Israelis wearing face masks and claiming that “tens of thousands of Jews are fleeing Israel.” The original post has since been deleted.

Disinformation was also published by accounts belonging to users in Syria and Iran – and even the Qatar-based Al Jazeera television station published an old video of a missile being intercepted over Tel Aviv, claiming that the city was under heavy Iranian bombardment. The Iranians also used old footage, publishing videos from previous rounds of fighting between Israel and Hamas and by a Russian news agency, which shared a video of a missile fired by Hamas during Operations Guardian of the Walls in the summer of 2021. The agency even added a patently false description of the clip, adding disinformation to the caption: “The Iron Dome can’t cope: First strikes on Israel, people are fleeing and seeking shelter.”

Disinformation of this kind can cause damage beyond the realm of public perception. For example, a genuine video of Muslims celebrating Ramadan at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem was incorrectly portrayed by many users as Arab citizens of Israel celebrating the Iranian attack, in order to cause unrest within Israeli society. The video was shared in several languages and on all the main social media platforms, including Reddit, Telegram and X. It was shared not only by pro-Palestinian accounts, but also by pro-Israel users – like, for example, Amir Tsarfati, an Israeli who is active in the evangelist community and whose posts get millions of views. Both sides have their own reasons for doing so.

Anything Goes: Ukraine, Syria and Video Games

In addition to using archive footage from previous conflicts between Israel and Hamas, the use of videos from far-away conflicts has also become commonplace in the fake news industry. For example, at the start of the war in Gaza, pro-Palestinian accounts shared footage from the Syrian civil war in an effort to “prove” that the Israeli assault on the Strip was, indeed, unrestrained. This week, similar use was made of videos from the war between Russia and Ukraine, which some accounts tried to pass off as Iranian missiles hitting Israel. As published by Fake Reporter, for example, an X account known as Syrian Girl, which disseminates pro-Iranian propaganda, shared to its millions of followers a video showing a Ukrainian attack on the Crimean Peninsula, alleging instead that it showed “Iranian missiles striking an illegal Israeli settlement.”

Another common type of fake news is artificial content, including content created by computer programs, lifted directly from video games or generated using one of the many easily accessible artificial intelligence generation programs. One of the images shared by Hinkle, for example, was generated by AI and shows rows upon rows of drones making their way toward Israel. Sprinter Factory, an account with half a million followers, went in another direction and created a fake image of American officials bowing down to the Israeli flag.

It is worth noting at this stage that it is not just anti-Israel accounts that use fake news. Indeed, on occasion the same item of fake news serves both sides when given a different interpretation. A 90,000-member strong Facebook group known as “Friends who love Benjamin Netanyahu,” for example, shared a clip from the Arma 3 video game, claiming that it showed missiles being intercepted, along with the following caption: “There is a God above and Israel has the Iron Dome.” As if there are not enough genuine videos put out by the IDF of missiles being intercepted by Israel’s much-vaunted aerial defense systems. The video has since been deleted from the group’s page.

Another worrying example was provided by Shayan Sardarizadeh, a journalist for BBC Verify, who specializes in online disinformation, revealed that a video uploaded by the IDF on its official X account, contained not only a collection of clips of Iranian missiles being intercepted, but  also included a short, decade-old clip, from a Russian missile strike. 

The video has been viewed more than 2 million times and was removed after an inquiry by Shomrim on the matter. 

The IDF spokesperson stated in response: "In the video published on the social media networks of the IDF spokesperson for international media, a 3-second video, of the launch of ballistic missiles that did not originate in Iran, was used. This was a human error, the relevant part of the video was removed and the necessary lessons have been learned."