A falsified news release claiming that the Biden administration had allocated $8 billion in emergency aid to Israel was widely circulated online.
According to a report by NBC News, the doctored document, which appears to be a modified version of an actual memo by President Joe Biden announcing $400 million in aid to Ukraine, was first noticed on social media on Saturday morning. It was subsequently shared by a number of verified accounts on X, previously known as Twitter, further boosting its reach.
Despite being flagged as false by the White House, the faked document and its claims continued to be posted across the internet, even ranking high in Google search results. Several online publications were tricked into writing full articles based on the false news, which still prominently appears in online search results.
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Many posts sharing the falsified document are still up and have gathered hundreds of thousands of views. Some posts on X now carry “community notes” clarifying that the document is false, but numerous posts remain without this clarification.
The spread of this misinformation was not limited to X. The doctored release was also posted on other social media platforms such as TikTok, albeit on a smaller scale.
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