A fake image purporting to show an explosion near the Pentagon briefly went viral on Twitter on Monday, forcing fact-checkers to scramble to counter the false claim as it was pushed by a variety of verified accounts.
The image, which shows a large plume of smoke next to a rectangular building with only a passing resemblance to the Pentagon, was shared by a number of open source intelligence and verified news Twitter accounts. As of late April, verified users on Twitter are people who have paid $8 per month for the company’s «Blue» subscription service, which gives users a blue checkmark. along with some other advantagesbut the service no longer confirms the identity of the user.
The image appears to have been first shared on Twitter by an account with the handle @CBKNews121 at 8:42 am ET. That account, which is verified, includes a variety of iconography associated with conspiracy theories, including John F. Kennedy Jr. as his profile photo. QAnon believers falsely claim that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his own death and will run for Vice President with Donald Trump in 2024.
Shortly after posting the image, CBKNews posted a tweet supporting QAnon.
Watch #ElonMusk for the next 60 days. P. Big,” she tweeted the account.
CBKNews did not respond to a Twitter request for comment and later deleted the Pentagon explosion tweet. John Scott-Railton, a senior fellow at the Citizen Lab, which is based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, tweeted that the image showed signs to have been generated by artificial intelligence.
Before it was removed, the image took on a life of its own.
RT, Russia’s official propaganda outlet, tweeted at 10:03 a.m. ET about «reports of an explosion near the Pentagon.»
A business news aggregation influencer with more than 650,000 followers on Twitter who is best known for posting Bloomberg News headlines posted about a «Major Explosion Near Pentagon Complex» at 10:06 a.m. That account later deleted the tweet, but not until after racking up hundreds of retweets.
The spread of the tweet appeared to spook some investors. The S&P 500 it fell sharply in the minutes after the image was amplified by well-followed accounts. She later recouped those losses.
Shortly after that tweet, anonymous Wall Street news blog ZeroHedge posted the fake image of the Pentagon explosion for the account’s 1.6 million followers, along with the caption «EXPLOSION NEAR PENTAGON.» ZeroHedge later deleted the tweet.
At this point, fake news organizations on Twitter that had purchased «verified» checkmarks began pushing the hoax. The @BloombergFeed account, which is not affiliated with Bloomberg, posted the conspiracy theory minutes later. That account has since been suspended by Twitter.
At around 10:27 a.m. ET, the Arlington, Virginia, fire department tweeted that «NO explosion or incident is taking place at or near the Pentagon.»
Nick Waters, a researcher at digital investigative firm Bellingcat, told NBC News that the panic surrounding the image «never made any sense.»
«There are quite a few red flags in this image,» Waters said. “When you try to place this image in space and geolocate it, you can’t because it’s not a real place. It’s not a building that’s anywhere in Washington authentically.»
Waters also noticed that the billboards in front of the fake building morph and merge with each other.
After the fake image of the Pentagon went viral on Monday morning, a similar image of the White House was torched by an impersonator. Waters noted that the image did not take off in the same way as the Pentagon image, in part because it «didn’t look like the White House at all.»
“The AI is still not very good at producing precise locations, and you can really see it in the image,” Waters said.