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By Ben Goggin, Elizabeth Chuck, and Anna Schecter - NBC News
A fake White House press release posted on social media falsely claimed that the administration of Democrat Joe Biden had authorized $8 billion in emergency aid to Israel on Saturday. The fact that it was a lie did not prevent it from reaching the top of Google's search results.
This forged document exemplifies the hoaxes and attempts to sow disinformation following the Palestinian group Hamas's attack on Israel, which since Saturday has claimed the lives of more than 600 Israelis; in addition, Hamas claims to have taken 30 hostages.
The fake press release (which spread on social networks but was not published on the White House website or in the Federal Register of Presidential Documents) deceived several online publications that wrote articles on the matter and managed to make it appear prominent in search engines. It appears to be an edited version of the memo with which Biden announced $400 million in aid to Ukraine in July.
The fake document surfaced on social media accounts Saturday morning; at noon there were already verified accounts of the social network X (before, Twitter) that were disseminating it (being verified allows you to earn money with the contents in that network). In many cases it is still published in those accounts, and has accumulated hundreds of thousands of views; Some posts have attached notes from users pointing out that this is a hoax, but many more do not.
The hoax jumped from Twitter to other social networks such as TikTok, but on a much smaller scale. NBC News tried unsuccessfully to contact X for comment; since being bought by billionaire Elon Musk, the social network has scaled back its operations that could have tried to moderate misinformation.
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On Google and other search engines it is still easy to find fake news that seems to be written after the false statement was spread. When searching for information about Biden's aid to Israel, one of the first results on Google was a fake article from a Mumbai-based publication called First Post. The article appeared in Google's "Featured Stories" module along with articles from leading US media. Without giving sources, First Post repeated the hoax of the statement. Another publication called OneIndia also published an article about the false information.
The fake document appears to have followed reports Saturday that Biden would announce financial aid to Israel in the coming days. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he is "working to ensure Israel has what it needs to defend itself," according to the Wall Street Journal. For his part, Biden said Saturday that "America stands with the people of Israel."
By 2023, Congress allocated $3.800 billion to Israel, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, which adds that in its entire history 158,000 million have been given to that country.
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Disinformation in networks after the attack
As Israel suffered one of the most serious attacks in 50 years, lies and misinformation about what was happening proliferated online. A widely circulated video, for example, claimed to show an Israeli bombing in retaliation for the Palestinian assault when in fact it was an airstrike last May, Reuters news agency reported.
In another case, numerous users of social networks X and TikTok spread a video showing two planes towed by land. Some said it was Israeli Defense evacuating air bases near Gaza; another said it was Hamas carrying Israeli planes. In reality, the video appeared on September 19 on the YouTube network (owned by Google), almost a month before the attacks.
Many of the videos used in a deceptive way were disseminated by verified users of the social network X (eligible to make money from those contents, especially if they become viral).
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Israel has used social media (e.g., TikTok, Instagram, and X) to condemn the attack by Hamas, which it has likened to the Islamic State (ISIS) terror group: "Same ideology, different names," read a post showing Hamas's abduction of Israelis during Saturday's assault.
Many social networks have banned Hamas (considered by the United States as a terrorist organization), which does spread its messages through the messaging platform Telegram. On Saturday, his number of followers on that network skyrocketed. On that channel, Hamas posted propaganda videos and images of the assault, which have since been disseminated by other users on other social networks.
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Among the recordings circulated Saturday were videos of Israeli civilian hostages being taken to Gaza. Others said they showed Hamas militants opening fire on attendees at a music festival in Israel.
"The images and videos Hamas has released of innocent civilians are objectively horrific. And while they may have released these videos in hopes of mobilizing other Palestinians to launch attacks, they are more likely to draw the international community to Israel's side," said Jonathan Lord, director of the Middle East Security Program at New American Security, a research think tank in Washington.