How embarrassing.
Texas governor Greg Abbott was duped by someone’s upload of a video game clip and retweeted it Sunday night thinking it was actual footage of the Iran war.
In a since-deleted post, Abbott — a vocal ally of President Donald Trump — retweeted the video with the cheeky caption “Bye bye.”
Good one, Abbott. Got a zinger for the characters in Call of Duty too?
Alex Driggers, an Austin American-Statesman reported, noticed that the clip Abbott shared wasn’t real and appeared to have come from the World War II-themed video game War Thunder.
The original post Abbott shared was also fact-checked by social media platform X using its “Readers added context” feature. “The video shows simulated footage from a video game depicting a battleship; the US Navy has no battleships in service and no Iranian plane attack on a US ship has occurred,” according to the response.
Oops.
It’s not a good look when an elected official gets duped by fake footage that isn’t even depicting a battle set in this century. But Abbott is far from the only social media user getting duped amid the U.S. military action in Iran.
Wired reported Saturday that X has become a cesspool of misinformation following the joint strikes by Israel and the United States on Iran.
X and other platforms are also awash in viral AI-generated images, such as the one below, purportedly showing President Donald Trump yelling at Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. However, a quick reverse image search indicates the image is AI-generated by the lack of hits it has on legitimate news sources.
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