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Fake explosions, fake missiles, fake troops: AI videos and images of ... An AI-generated video depicts a fake scene in which captured US soldiers are held by Iranian soldiers. Obtained by CNN AI Social media Fighting disinformation The Middle East See all topics Facebook Tweet Email Link Threads Link Copied! Follow After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, social media was littered with crude fakes that were presented as fresh images of the war but were either photoshopped phonies or mislabeled clips taken from video games, movies, past incidents and unrelated news coverage. Those kinds of old-fashioned fakes are now spreading again during the war against Iran. This time, they have been joined by a form of deception that wasn’t readily available in 2022: high-quality videos and still images that have been custom-created with easy-to-use artificial intelligence tools. Ten years ago, said Hany Farid , a University of California, Berkeley, professor specializing in digital forensics, “there’d be like one or two fake things out there; they’d get debunked pretty fast. … Now you see hundreds of them, and they’re really realistic.” Farid added: “It’s not just realistic, it’s landing — it’s l…

How AI Content Detection is Being Weaponized in the Iran War An image purporting to be a heatmap analysis of a photo taken in Iran (described below). Across social media platforms,AI-generated images,fabricated videos, and repurposedvideo game footageare spreading at extraordinary speed in the Iran-Israel-US war, which may be remembered as the first conflict where AI overwhelmed the information environment at an unprecedented scale. Synthetic visuals depicting bombings and destruction circulate alongside authentic documentation of real events, making itincreasingly difficultto distinguish fact from fiction. Major news organizations, includingWIRED,BBCandCNN, have already documented the surge of fake AI war imagery circulating online. But a more troubling tactic is emerging from this chaos: technical looking analyses are being weaponized to falsely discredit authentic evidence. None of this is surprising. In fact, it was entirely predictable. For years, researchers and civil society organizations, includingours, have warned that releasing powerful generative AI tools without meaningful safeguards would eventually collide with geopolitical crises. This war appears to be the culmi…

#FactCheck -AI-Generated Image Falsely Shared as Iranian Soldiers ... ‍ ‍Amid rising tensions involving Iran, Israel and the United States following reports in early April 2026 that Iran had shot down an American fighter aircraft, a picture is going viral on social media claiming to show Iranian soldiers standing beside the wreckage of a destroyed helicopter while holding the Iranian flag. Research by CyberPeace Research Wing found that the viral claim is false. The image has been created using artificial intelligence and does not depict any real incident. The picture was generated using Google AI tools and is being misleadingly circulated online with different claims. ‍ A Facebook page named “official salman 09” shared the image on May 1, 2026, along with a lengthy caption describing the scene as a symbol of Iran’s battlefield success. The post portrayed the image as evidence of a helicopter being brought down during ongoing tensions in the Middle East and suggested that the photo reflected strength, morale and victory in war. ‍ ‍ To verify the authenticity of the image, we first conducted a reverse image search using Google Lens. The image did not appear in any credible ne…

An AI "army" flooded TikTok during the Iran War. Not one of the soldiers was real. At dotNex.ai, we traced the operation: 110 fake accounts, 3.9M views, one AI pipeline — engineered to shape how Americans feel about a war. Read the full report at reports.dotnex.ai

Viral AI fakes flood social media as Iran mourns Khamenei Iran drew huge crowds for former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's funeral procession in Tehran, documented by international news agencies. But alongside genuine images pf mourners, AI-generated videos and photos falsely claiming to show the event have spread widely online. Some exaggerate crowd size, while others contain tell-tale AI errors and fabricated landmarks to rack up clicks and engagement.

Fake footage of US-Iran war floods social media | AAP WHAT WAS CLAIMED Photos and videos show genuine footage from the 2026 war in Iran. OUR VERDICT False. The videos and photos in question are either AI-generated or unrelated to the 2026 war. AAP FACTCHECK - Social media has been flooded with misinformation related to the US-Israeli attack on Iran and Iran's subsequent retaliatory strikes. AAP FactCheckhas found numerous examples of content generated using artificial intelligence (AI) being passed off as genuine war footage, or old imagery being misattributed to recent events. Australian-based commentator Maram Susli (also known as Syrian Girl or Partisan Girl)posted a videoof a burning building to X, which she claimed was "Footage of CIA headquarters in Dubai targeted this morning by Iran". However, the video actually shows a2015 fireat a residential building in Sharjah, a United Arab Emirates city that neighbours Dubai. The residential fire was reported by many news outlets, includingFox News,BBC News,Gulf Newsand the Dubai-basedKhaleej Times, in October 2015. The 'Syrian Girl' X account alsoposted videos and imagesthat claim to show three Dubai landmarks on fire - the…

Cascade of A.I. Fakes About War With Iran Causes Chaos Online A.I. A.I. A.I. A.I. A.I. A.I. A torrent of fake videos and images generated by artificial intelligence have overrun social networks during the first weeks of the war in Iran. The videos — showing huge explosions that never happened, decimated city streets that were never attacked or troops protesting the war who do not exist — have added a chaotic and confusing layer to the conflict online. The New York Times identified over 110 unique A.I.-generated images and videos from the past two weeks about the war in the Middle East. The fakes covered every aspect of the fighting: They falsely depicted screaming Israelis cowering as explosions ripped through Tel Aviv, Iranians mourning their dead and American military vessels bombarded with missiles and torpedoes. Collectively, they were seen millions of times online through networks like X, TikTok and Facebook, and countless more times within private messaging apps popular in the region and around the world. The Times identified the A.I. content by checking for both obvious signs — such as depictions of buildings that do not exist, garbled text and behaviors or movements that d…

Disinformation and War Propaganda in the Iran-Israel-US War (As of 23 ... When I saw this A wave of posts claimed Benjamin Netanyahu was dead. Here’s how it spread . I realized it is time to update the disinformation patterns: Disinformation and War Propaganda in the Iran-Israel-US War (As of 23 March 2026) Overview Since Operation Epic Fury began on 28 February 2026, the Iran-Israel-US conflict has generated an information war of historically unprecedented scale and technological sophistication. Independent fact-checkers, academic researchers, and media watchdogs have documented disinformation, propaganda, and narrative manipulation emanating from all sides of the conflict — the Islamic Republic of Iran, the State of Israel, and the United States government — as well as from financially motivated non-state actors exploiting the conflict for online engagement. The New York Times identified over 110 distinct AI-generated images and videos in the first two weeks of fighting alone, while NewsGuard documented at least 18 false war-related claims from Iranian state media since 28 February. However, a comprehensive and academically rigorous accounting also requires scrutiny of Israeli a…

Which fact‑checking organizations have debunked viral ... Your searches will appear here This article may be outdated. Consider refreshing it to get the most current information. Executive summary Major international fact‑checking organizations including AFP Fact Check, Reuters Fact Check, Full Fact, Yahoo/verified partners and other outlets stepped into the post‑Feb. 28 torrent of viral claims about Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, using a consistent toolkit: provenance checks against state media, reverse‑image and reverse‑video searches to find earlier sources, and AI detection/metadata analysis (notably Google’s Gemini/SynthID tools) to flag synthetic visuals[1][2][3][4][5]. 1. Who the debunkers were: established agencies and regional outlets Agence France‑Presse’s fact‑check unit (AFP Fact Check) published rapid analyses labeling circulated photos of Khamenei’s purported corpse as AI‑generated and highlighted visual errors and tool flags that indicated synthetic origin[1], Reuters ran multiple fact‑checks that corrected miscaptioned photos and videos and identified older footage reused for 2026 events[2][6][5], and Full Fact in the U.K. concluded a high‑profi…