Russian ‘proof’ of US helping ISIS turns out to be video game screen grab
November 15, 2017 by admin
Filed under Latest Lingerie News
Russia’s latest propaganda attempt backfired badly.
Media: Vocativ
Russia’s Defense Ministry on Tuesday posted several photos on social media purportedly showing “irrefutable evidence” that the United States was helping Islamic State terrorists.
The photos were published on the official Russian-language Twitter and Facebook accounts for the ministry and also on the ministry’s English and Arabic accounts.
So today @mod_russia got caught out using images from old videos and computer games to attack the US, and you might be forgiven to think this is a one off deception, but they’ve been caught lying before (a thread) https://t.co/yUwoEV7GGc
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) November 14, 2017
It didn’t take long for the “irrefutable” to be refuted.
Online sleuths discovered that one of the photos — supposedly showing an ISIS convoy leaving Abu Kamel on Nov. 9, 2017 — appeared to be a screen grab from the 2015 mobile video game AC-130 Gunship Simulator: Special Ops Squadron.
Another image was identified by the Russian military research site Conflict Intelligence Team and the investigative website Bellingcat as a shot from footage of Iraq taken in 2016.
The Russian Ministry of Defense post photos Tuesday on Twitter and Facebook purportedly showing “evidence” of the U.S. backing ISIS. Those claims were quickly debunked by online sleuths.
The Russian Ministry of Defense post photos Tuesday on Twitter and…
“This is the best evidence the [Russian MOD] are shameless liars, they take a video game screenshot then claim it’s from a specific location and date,” Kings College research associate Eliot Higgins said in a post on bellingcat.com.
The Russian Defense Ministry has since deleted all of the photos, claiming a “mistake.”
Higgins explained how much effort went into this “mistake.” He said it involved:
- Taking screenshots at times in the original videos with no explosions,
- Cropping text out the image,
- Adding captions in three languages,
- Posting it on multiple accounts.
The fake-news photo manipulations were nothing new for the ministry, which has previously used bogus images to support false reports claiming Russian planes had not bombed a Syrian hospital and mosque, according to Bellingcat.
