Have you seen video of a digital billboard that appears to show a message of support for Ukraine getting squeezed out by a new message to support Israel? It’s gone viral on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. But it’s completely fake.
“Advertising in New York… The text ‘Support Israel’ squeezes out the text ‘Support Ukraine’,” the viral tweet, posted by an account called Wizard SX, reads.
I contacted Clear Channel, which owns the digital billboard, and the outdoor advertising company confirmed the video has been digitally altered to show a message that’s not there in the real world.
“That ad is not running on that screen. It’s a fake,” Clear Channel’s Jason King told me over email on Tuesday.
The tweet has been viewed over 10 million times since it was published on Monday, but it’s not clear who’s behind the Wizard SX account or why they shared it. The video appeared on a Russian-language Telegram channel five days ago, though that person appears to express confusion about whether the video is real.
“It’s funny that the video plays over an advertisement for the cartoon Trolls. Is this subtle trolling or a coincidence?” the Telegram account asked, according to Google Translate.
There were a number of signs the video is fake, even before I received confirmation from Clear Channel. For starters, the very end of the video includes a very bizarre tag line ostensibly for ABC News: “What the news. Stay in trend.” Needless to say, something like “Stay in trend” comes across as the kind of thing someone who doesn’t have a very good grasp of the English language might say.
The typography is also poorly spaced using a font that’s relatively difficult for English speakers to read properly.
Misinformation and disinformation have been spreading like wildfire on social media ever since the terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7 that killed 1,200 people and 240 more were taken hostage. And while X has a crowdsourced program called Community Notes that allows users to fact-check various tweets, the program hasn’t yet picked up this fake despite it being seen over 10 million times in roughly a 24 hour period.
We’ve seen everything from fake AI images that make it look like Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the hospital to video taken out of context to make it look like Palestinians are faking their deaths.
It’s not clear why someone created this fake digital billboard, but it almost certainly won’t be the last manufactured image to go viral online before the Israel-Hamas war is over.
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