Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was duped by video game footage and believed he was watching actual war footage between the U.S. and Iran.
In an embarrassing post on X, Abbott reshared a 21-second clip that had been posted by a pro-Donald Trump account with the caption: “An Iranian plane VS a US ship. I could watch this all day.”
Abbott replied to the clearly inaccurate footage of a plane getting shot down somewhere in the ocean with: “Bye bye.” The Texas Republican eventually realized the humiliating mistake he had posted to his 1.4 million X followers and deleted it.
As noted by Alex Driggers, a transportation and infrastructure reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, not only was the clip Abbott shared not real, but it appeared to have come from the WWII video game War Thunder.
The original post that Abbott shared was also fact-checked by X using its “Readers added context” feature, which calls out false or misleading information on the social network.
“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,” the added context reads.
On Saturday, Wired reported that Elon Musk’s X had immediately become “flooded” with misinformation after Trump announced that the U.S. had joined Israel to launch a “major combat operation” against Iran.
The article noted how X, formerly Twitter, used to be the go-to place for breaking news, but the platform has now become a “verifiable mess” under Musk’s leadership.
After reviewing hundreds of videos over the weekend, Wired found multiple examples of clips being widely shared that were actually months or years old, attributed to incorrect locations, or featuring AI-generated images.
There was even another example of an X user sharing video game footage from War Thunder while believing it was real footage from the conflict in Iran.
Elsewhere, Abbott found another way to voice his support for Trump’s latest attack on a foreign country in a Sunday statement.
“Texas stands with President Trump in sending a clear message to Iran: its aggression toward America and the West will no longer be tolerated,” Abbott said.
“These joint operations with our allies in the Middle East are a clear demonstration of American resolve to neutralize threats from rogue regimes that endanger our troops, our allies, and global stability. The Iranian people deserve to be free from the radical dictatorship that has held them captive for too long.”
Abbott also announced he would be deploying the Texas National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety to ramp up patrols at energy facilities, ports, and the southern border amid fears of retaliatory strikes from Iran.
The Daily Beast has contacted Abbott’s office for comment.
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