Have you seen a video claiming to show former president Donald Trump’s plane being escorted by fighter jets? It’s gone viral on several social media platforms like TikTok and X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. But it’s not what it appears to be.
“No gag order can stop him. No frivolous lawsuit will defeat him. He’s the most well guarded President,” a right-wing influencer account on X called Shadow of Ezra tweeted on Friday.
Another X account that goes by the named Derek Broes tweeted the video with something similar, insisting, “Is it weird that this how Trump is guarded as an ‘Ex’ President? It’s strange.”
But the video doesn’t actuslly show former president Trump’s plane. It’s not even a real video.
The video has sometimes been identified as belonging to the current president, Joe Biden. But, again, it’s not real. It was made using Digital Combat Simulator, a flight simulation game first released in 2008.
It appears the video was made by a YouTube account called iceman_fox, which also helped spread a fake video back in September that claimed to show an F-35 fighter jet the moment in crashed in South Carolina. That video was also made with Digital Combat Simulator.
Derek Broes also has a long history of spreading fake information on X, including the time he hyped up fears of “military movements” back in June. Broes kept suggesting that videos of military vehicles on American highways was a sign of something nefarious, as though the average American doesn’t see random military vehicles being moved here and there all the time while driving. It should be noted that Broes often tweets about how he lives in Mexico and doesn’t appear to have any insider knowledge of U.S. military movements, despite often suggesting that he does.
There’s a lot of fake images and videos that go viral on X these days under the ownership of Elon Musk. As I explained yesterday while examining the viral claims that Joe Biden was actually just a body double wearing a Biden mask, I laid out the reasons that misinformation spreads more quickly on the social media platform these days. The short version: Musk has financially incentivized the most outlandish content while boosting the tweets of anyone who pays him $8 per month.
That’s been a brutal combination, especially as people try to get breaking news in a highly confused environment like the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Unless Musk decides to just undo the changes he’s made over the past year, X will continue to be a nightmare for trying to find reliable information. But in many ways that’s just the world we live in now. And it’s only going to get worse as we get closer to the 2024 presidential election.
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