Phony images of the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan are spreading online, from doctored CNN broadcasts to fake Twitter accounts
- Numerous misleading clips and doctored images purporting to show Afghanistan are going viral online.
- Several fake CNN broadcast images went viral and have been debunked by multiple outlets.
- Unverified Twitter accounts purporting to be official organizations also shared false information.
Numerous false or misleading videos and photos about Afghanistan circulated as the Taliban overtook the country and captured its capital in the last week.
The Taliban, which began to storm across Afghanistan in May as the United States continued to withdraw troops, rapidly captured many of the country's major cities in the last week. On Sunday, Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani left the country and the Taliban successfully took over Kabul, the nation's capital.
Facebook and Twitter have labeled many of the videos as "partly false information" or "presented out of context," respectively.
One major misleading video to spread claimed to show Ghani fleeing the Taliban when it took control of Kabul over the weekend. But in truth, the footage showed Ghani boarding a plane to attend a conference in Uzbekistan in July, before the Taliban's takeover. Still, several verified accounts on Twitter and Facebook shared the clip on Sunday with misleading captions.
A Twitter spokesperson told Insider that they added a label to one specific tweet of the video because the post violated the platform's "synthetic and manipulated media policy."
Several other misleading videos purporting to show the situation in Afghanistan went viral.
According to USA Today and other outlets, several Facebook pages falsely said that a video of armed figures firing in the street was from the Taliban's recent takeover of Kabul when, in actuality, it was filmed in Syria in 2015.
The news magazine India Today also reported that a clip of a person hanging on the edge of an airplane engine went viral, with at least one popular social media account falsely saying the video showed an Afghan citizen trying to escape the Taliban. According to India Today, the video is at least a year old and was digitally edited.
Multiple manipulated images purporting to show CNN broadcasts went viral on social media
Doctored or misleading images related to CNN journalists and broadcasts continue to appear on social media.
A doctored picture spread on Sunday purporting to show a CNN broadcast in Kabul with a chyron reading, "Violent but mostly peaceful transfer of power," purportedly referring to the Taliban taking over Afghanistan. On Facebook, a right-wing account called Occupy Democrats Logic, which has over 800,000 followers, shared the fake image on Sunday and amassed over 5,000 likes and 1,000 shares.
A CNN reporter told Reuters that the image was doctored, and Reuters reported that the picture of the journalist in the fake photo was superimposed from an August 2020 CNN broadcast.
Facebook flagged the post as an "altered photo" and linked to articles from the Associated Press, Reuters, and other outlets that debunked the image.
Similarly, a misleading side-by-side photo sequence of the Kabul-based CNN journalist Clarissa Ward wearing no head covering in the first image and an abaya - a robe-like dress worn by some Muslim women - in the second started to circulate on Sunday, with people falsely saying that the photo showed what life was like before and after the Taliban took over.
"This meme is inaccurate," Ward wrote on Twitter on Monday, adding that the first photo was shot from inside a private facility while the second was taken on the streets of Kabul. She also said that she usually wore a headscarf on Kabul streets, but not with her hair fully covered and an abaya, "so there is a difference but not quite this stark," she wrote.
Another doctored image showing a CNN broadcast with the chyron, "Taliban fighters responsibly wearing masks," circulated on Instagram on Sunday, mainly boosted by one user, @vitorbelfort, who has over 1.2 million followers.
The fake image was made by the Babylon Bee, a right-wing satire publication, according to PolitiFact.
Twitter accounts purporting to be official organizations spread misinformation
According to PolitiFact, several unverified Twitter channels purporting to be official organizations - with names like "BBC Afghanistan" and "CNN Afghanistan" - were circulating the false information that an American CNN journalist named "Bernie Gores" had been captured and executed by the Taliban on Monday.
As the entertainment website MEAWW first reported, searching the CNN website for "Bernie Gores" bylines will return no results.
Additionally, a reverse image search of the "Bernie Gores" picture used in the tweets will pull up the 35-year-old Jordie Jordan, a YouTube gaming personality known for playing "Call of Duty." Jordan did not respond to a request for comment.
Twitter, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment about these accounts, appears to have suspended the accounts. Other social media accounts have reshared screenshots of the purported tweets.