A flood of falsehoods, including misleading videos, photos, and texts, has turned the Los Angeles immigration protests into ground zero for misinformation.
Much of what is on social media is intended to fan the flames, rehash old conspiracy theories, and drum up support for President Donald Trump’s immigration policies that include a daily quota for deportations.
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Most of the inflammatory posts online seem to depict all of Los Angeles engulfed in flames with looters and rioters running amok on the streets. While there have been some violent clashes, vandalism, and arrests, what is being shown, largely through an ideological lens, isn’t necessarily the truth.
Make America Great Again acolyte Laura Loomer, who has 1.7 million followers on X, advanced a claim that two photos taken by the San Francisco Chronicle showing California National Guard troops sleeping on the concrete floor of a Los Angeles federal building were created by artificial intelligence.
“Looks like @GavinNewsom used an AI photo to smear President Trump! Democrats love lying,” she posted on X.
The Pentagon later confirmed the photos’ authenticity, but Loomer’s post, which has amassed more than 340,000 views, has stayed up.
X’s AI bot, Grok, even got in on the action, initially claiming the news outlet’s photos “likely originated from Afghanistan.”
San Francisco Chronicle Editor-in-Chief Emilio García Ruiz said it was “unfortunate that hundreds of people, some of them with hundreds of thousands of followers, went on social media to falsely discredit photographs that are 100% accurate.”
“It’s all part of a larger attempt to damage the reputation of hard-working journalists and publish a false narrative that fits a political ideology at the expense of honesty,” he added.
In a separate incident, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was criticized after he reposted a video originally posted by actor James Woods on X showing multiple police cars being damaged and set on fire. Woods wrote, “If I hear one more leftist shill in mainstream media utter the words ‘peaceful protests,’ I’ll throw up.”
A fact check on the video came quickly from multiple sources to reveal it was actually from 2020.
“You’re a U.S. Senator so you should apologize and delete this tweet. It’s pure misinformation,” former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said.
Liberal activist Harry Sisson said, “This video is not from this year. This is blatant misinformation. Why are you lying? Delete this and apologize.” According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, dozens of posts on X have spread conspiracy theories about the events unfolding in Los Angeles. Many of those posts have more than a million views and little fact-checking.
Darren Linvill, a researcher at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, told The Hill that online fakes could provoke an escalation.
It “has the potential itself to exacerbate the situation on the ground because people are going to be more passionate about their set of beliefs,” he said.
On TikTok, an AI-generated video purported to show a National Guard member named Bob livestreaming how he was preparing for “today’s gassing” of protesters.
The video was viewed nearly 1 million times before it was taken down.
Some people in the comment section called the video an obvious fake, while others seemed to think it was real.
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“What’s happening on social media is similar to the chaos of the information environment around the 2020 George Floyd protests,” Renee DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and an expert on how conspiracy theories spread online, told CNN.
“People are trying to discern between real current footage and recycled sensational old footage repurposed for political or financial ends,” she said.