Adversaries take advantage of U.S. unilateral disarmament on foreign propaganda by gaslighting Americans. Several Chinese state-controlled propaganda outlets, including Xinhua-owned newspaper Reference News, last month tried to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Israel by posting a video claiming two U.S. military pilots had been arrested at the Pentagon after they refused to fly U.S. munitions to Israel. This was false. The video actually showed two veterans at a congressional hearing protesting Israeli actions in Gaza. Pro-Iran social media accounts falsely claimed that the Trump administration limited the movements of Iranian delegates to the recent U.N. General Assembly by banning their use of restrooms. The accounts spread an AI-generated image of Iranian officials standing in front of a UN-marked restroom door, blocked by a police officer holding a “No Entry” sign.

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, state-backed media in Russia and Iran along with China’s online proxies flooded the internet with falsehoods. Analysts at NewsGuard, the information reliability organization where I work, discovered 6,200 mentions of Kirk the week following his killing across the official outlets and social media accounts of the three nations. Russia blamed Ukraine for the killing. Iran blamed Israel’s Mossad. Pro-China accounts mocked the U.S. The goal was the same: Weaponize American grief, deepen domestic division and weaken Western alliances.

Read more on original:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/06/russia-china-iran-false-claims-deepfakes/