A false report of an explosion at the Pentagon that included a fake image of the building on fire was circulated on Twitter on Monday morning, The Associated Press reported.
“There is NO explosion or incident taking place at or near the Pentagon reservation, and there is no immediate danger or hazards to the public,” the Department of Defense’s Pentagon Force Protection Agency and the Arlington County fire department said in a joint statement on Twitter after the image began to circulate.
This morning, an AI generated image of an explosion at the US Pentagon surfaced.
— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) May 22, 2023
With multiple news sources reporting it as real, the S&P 500 fell 30 points in minutes.
This resulted in a $500 billion market cap swing on a fake image.
It then rebounded once the image was… pic.twitter.com/DpHgflkMXP
The fake image appeared to show a black cloud of smoke near a building that people on social media claimed was the Pentagon.
A verified account that impersonated a Bloomberg News news feed shared the photo. That account, called @BloombergFeed, has been suspended, according to NPR.
The photo was also spread by RT, a Russian state-media Twitter account, the AP reported. with over 3 million followers.
The tweet was originally shared by the Twitter user OSINTdefender, a Twitter account that describes itself as an “Open Source Intelligence Monitor.”
The post has since been deleted.
According to the AP, the tweet was shared just after the U.S. stock market opened for trading at 9:30 a.m. The fake news was enough to make investors nervous.
The S&P 500 briefly dropped around 0.3% as investors began to see the false claims that there was some sort of attack on the Pentagon.
