Have you seen a video claiming to show the F-35 that recently crashed in South Carolina after the pilot had to eject for unnamed reasons? It’s gone viral across several social media platforms, including TikTok and X, the site formerly known as Twitter. But it’s not real.
Joint Base Charleston in North Charleston raised a lot of eyebrows on Sunday after it issued a notice that citizens should be on the lookout for an “F-35 that was involved in a mishap” that afternoon. The pilot had to eject and the plane wasn’t located until Tuesday in a debris field in South Carolina.
But a video started to do the rounds late Tuesday claiming to be footage that was captured by regular citizens of the F-35 flying and then crashing into a fireball on the ground.
The video has been shared to sites like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X, racking up millions of views. But it was created using a computer game called Digital Combat Simulator, sometimes abbreviated as DCS. How do we know it’s definitely gaming footage? The account that shared the video, known as iceman_fox1 across serveral platforms, admits as much on YouTube.
The description of the YouTube video starts with a lie: “BREAKING: A group of hikers capture on video an F-35B fighter jet crashing over South Carolina.” But if you keep reading past the hashtags in the description you eventually get to this disclaimer: “Filmed with Digital Combat Simulator.”
The word “filmed” is a bit misleading, but at least whoever is behind this account admitted as much in the YouTube video. The problem is that no such disclaimer showed up on X, where the video has been shared by an account called Latest In Space. The account has a blue check mark, but that no longer means the identity of that user has been verified. X owner Elon Musk bought the site in October 2022 and stripped the so-called “legacy” check marks from existing users. But now anyone with $8 to spend can get “verified” and earn money through Musk’s creator compensation platform.
Social media platforms have always been flooded with fake images and videos, but it seems like a problem that continues to get worse with each passing week. Recently, there have been claims that New York was setting up quarantine camps for people with covid-19, that Burning Man had an outbreak of Ebola and that Ivanka Trump has bone-saw art in her living room. Some conspiracy theorists have even gone viral with claims that Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania is actually a body double. And, believe it or not, many people believe these things even after they’re debunked.
Don’t believe everything you see online. Especially if it’s going viral on X. The site now financially incentivizes bad actors in a way that it didn’t even just a year ago. And while Community Notes is a good program for providing context to false claims, it’s often slow to identify problems. For example, the X post above has been seen by roughly 700,000 people at the time of this writing and still hasn’t gotten a Community Note yet. That’s quite a few people (and counting) who are being fed information that simply isn’t true.
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