A Russian disinformation operation has turned its attention to the US midterm elections, unleashing a series of deepfake videos that depict celebrities attacking Democrats, researchers said, with more expected to come.
Politics
A mass rush of migrants crossing over from Morocco plunged Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta into turmoil in late July 2026, but a video claimed across social media to show those new arrivals flipping, kicking and throwing trash cans is unrelated. The footage dates to May and actually shows rioting in Toulouse, France after Paris Saint-Germain won the UEFA Champions League.
16.06.2026: Football celebration clip mislabeled as Albanian protests against Kushner-linked project
Protests have swelled across Albania since late May 2026 in opposition to the development of a luxury beach resort linked to US President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner. But a video spreading online of a massive gathering crowding a beach is unrelated; the footage captured a celebration of fans backing the Spanish football club Deportivo La Coruña.
Iran’s Tasnim News Agency is claiming a video shows an American hanging a black US flag outside his home to protest Israel’s relationship with the United States amid the war in the Middle East. But the clip is misrepresented; the video is from 2021, with the original TikTok poster saying the action was taken to express dissatisfaction with then-president Joe Biden’s administration.
Giorgia Meloni told reporters that allies should be frank with each other as tension between Italy and the United States grows over the war in the Middle East. But social media posts claiming the Italian prime minister said “no one throws around nuclear threats like Washington” and warned Donald Trump to “watch his words” appear to be referencing a fabricated statement, with no such comment made in the video embedded in the posts.
US President Donald Trump has highlighted other countries’ dependence on oil that transits the Strait of Hormuz as he pushes for them to help police the waterway, but his assertion that “about 90 percent” of China’s crude imports go through the strait is inaccurate. According to Chinese customs data, less than 40 percent of Beijing’s imported crude oil passes through the strait. Experts say that while China is not immune to disruptions caused by the Middle East war, imports from Russia and significant reserves helped cushion it from energy shocks.
AI-created videos circulating on Elon Musk’s X depict American soldiers captured by Iran, an Israeli city in ruins, and US embassies ablaze — a surge of lifelike deepfakes despite a policy crackdown to curb wartime disinformation.
The satellite image posted by an Iranian news outlet looked real: a devastated US base in Qatar. But it was an AI-generated fake, underscoring the accelerating threat of tech-enabled disinformation during wartime.
Social media users and vloggers are claiming the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) ran an image generated by artificial intelligence in an article on the Iranian supreme leader killed by US-Israeli strikes. But while some have objected to the CBC’s use of the picture of two women crying, the claims that it is fake appear to have originated with a hallucinated response from X’s chatbot Grok; the original photo was distributed by Reuters and published by several other news organizations.
For the first State of the Union address of his second term, US President Donald Trump sought to paint a…