A video collage of people dancing in Kyiv nightclubs has racked up nearly 30 million views, with claims the war in Ukraine is exaggerated.
But the videos are all taken from a TikTok account that shares old clips of Kyiv nightlife, who says they're all from 2021, before the war.
15,000 retweets, 75,000 likes, and 15 million views for these Kyiv nightlife clips from 2021 via Ian Miles Cheong, who has form when it comes to sharing misinformation about Ukraine.
This is one of the issues with Community Notes. The current note is false. These videos are not from Warsaw. They are from 2021 in Kyiv, before the Russian invasion.
The original account that posted the videos is using the inaccurate note to reinforce the false claim.
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THREAD: a collection of fake Twitter accounts after the removal of legacy verification
A fake account with Blue subscription posing as Sudan's Rapid Support Forces, currently involved in a conflict, falsely claimed the death of its leader Mohamed Dagalo, getting 1.7M views.
Several fake accounts are posing as New York Mayor Eric Adams.
@NYCMayor is the genuine personal account of Eric Adams. The rest are all fake.
A fake account impersonating Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has just been suspended by Twitter.
The fake account simply added another "s" to Lightfoot's official handle @chicagosmayor.
Every detail of the way the classified Pentagon leaks were shared by Jack Teixeira on Discord server Thug Shaker Central and made public months later would get rejected as too ridiculous and hard to believe if it'd been offered as a spy film script to a major Hollywood studio.
Bunch of permanently online kids form a Discord server with a name taken from a gay porn meme to share their love of guns, offensive memes and shooting games during lockdown. Young insecure dude from a military intel family starts sharing docs to impress his mates in October.
His mates, mainly interested in gun videos and shooting other video game characters, ignore him. Young insecure dude gets offended, starts sharing actual classified docs to look cool and tells his teen comrades to keep the docs to themselves. They do, but only for a few weeks.
THREAD: This type of Twitter account, right here, is among the worst on this platform.
It's a spam account that manipulates the empathy and compassion of users with the sole purpose of getting maximum engagement and building as large an audience as possible.
Let's take a look.
Let's start by checking its profile photo.
Run a simple reverse image search and you'll quickly see that not only has the image been taken from the internet, but it's a digitally-altered image of Turkish actress Özge Gürel.
It's not a real person. Not a good start.
Now, let's check some of its content.
Here, it claims to be disabled and asks for retweets and birthday wishes. The tweet did reasonably well. Lots of people responded.
But a simple reverse search reveals that's Canadian wheelchair racer Michelle Stilwell in 2012.
Social media is awash with false or misleading images, some of which get millions of engagements.
So, here's a simple guide on ways you can quickly check the veracity of an image you see on your social media feeds.
Reverse image search is the most fundamental part of content verification - the process of searching to find if, and when, an image has appeared on the internet before, and in what context.
Google Lens, Yandex, TinEye and Bing are among the free tools that allow you to do this.
Lens is Google's excellent tool for checking online content.
Here's a tweet by US conspiracy theorist Stew Peters claiming this cloud was seen in Turkey just before the recent earthquake.
On Chrome, simply right-click on the image and select "search image with Google".
Hundreds of Iranian schoolgirls in several cities have been reporting mysterious incidents of "poisoning" over the last few weeks.
The authorities have confirmed cases of "poisoning", but no-one seems to know what material is involved and who's behind these alleged poisonings.
Today has been the worst day of the alleged "poisonings" so far, with several videos of schoolgirls in different cities reporting breathing issues and being hospitalised. Some schools have shut down.
It's unclear what exactly is happening, or why.
What's adding to the fear and confusion among the public is the utter incompetence and cluelessness of Iranian officials who are supposed to be investigating this.
Health ministry officials say this is "Nitrogen (N2) gas poisoning". That's not a thing.