The video that falsely claimed that the United States Agency for International Development Ben Stiller, Angelina Jolie and other actors paid millions of dollars to travel to Ukraine a clip of e! News seemed to be, although it never appeared on the entertainment channel.
In fact, the video came for the first time on X in a message from an account that researchers said that the Russian disinformation is spreading.
Within a few hours it attracted the attention of Elon Musk, who re -placed it. That did the son of President Trump Donald Trump Jr.
They strengthened the false video when Mr. Musk had closed a crusade on USAID, the office that has spread a large part of the foreign help of the government since 1961. Working with Mr Trump's blessing as head of a campaign for the efficiency of the government, Mr. Musk and others in the administration have taken over the headquarters of the office, informed frozen subsidies and employees that almost all will be dismissed .
The dismantling of the agency is accompanied by a stream of anger online of right -wing influencers and accounts that promote false claims and conspiration thinking.
While some politicians and voters have long questioned the value of foreign aid, those who attack the agency have often distorted facts and, whitily or unconsciously, embraced if that can help to justify the focus on USAID
That includes Mr. Musk himself, who used the platform that he took over in 2022 as a megaphone for the attempt to lower federal bureaucracy. On Sunday, Mr. Musk called it 'a criminal organization', without explaining the basis for such an accusation.
“He exploits ignorance about how the government works, and the lack of supervision of everything he does,” said Mike Rothschild, a researcher of disinformation and author of “Jewish Space Lasers”, a book about conspiracy theories. “It is all incredibly dangerous and happens right for us.”
The flurry of attacks also underlined again how much Republican views have increasingly gathered with propaganda that comes from the Kremlin or with stories that are tailored to his international goals, especially on the platform of Mr. Musk. The false video about the celebrities seemed to be the work of an influence campaign that yielded dozens of similar fakes about the Russian war in Ukraine, according to the Media Forensics Hub of Clemson University.
“The Russian anti-ukraine propaganda has thoroughly infiltrated certain communities on X,” said Darren L. Linvill, a researcher there, who followed the spread of the falsified clip of its origin on X via a network of accounts that previously has Russian fake Spread.
“Given how much time Musk spends on his platform,” said Dr. Linvill, “It was probably inevitable that a manufactured Russian message would resonate with him, and it almost seemed designed to do that.”
Mr. Musk nor Donald Trump Jr. responded immediately to requests for comment.
X did not respond immediately to a request for comment on the distribution of wrong information about USAID on the platform, although it has added a note to messages that share the video about the actors, and noted that it is not real.
Much of the Raziernij Online has focused on the many subsidies from USAID this week, which has been publicly available for years.
One viral claim started, for example, after an account on X with more than half a million followers suggested that Polico, the Washington News website, had received more than $ 8 million from USAID
That was not true. The website had received around $ 44,000 from USAID for subscriptions to its premium environmental and energy publication for two years, and more than $ 8 million in subscription income from different agencies, including the Department of Energy.
Yet the claim quickly shot on social media, because influencers and politicians with even more followers strengthened the idea.
That caused a round of other misleading claims about USAID that grants money to the BBC and the New York Times. (Instead, the Agency has granted money to an independent charity that shares a name with the BBC. The most viral claim about the New York Times was based on an inaccurate search for government registers that include subsidies for non-related but similar sounding groups , such as New York University.
The facts did not succeed in reaching an important audience online, but the wrong information was increased by prominent podcasters, politicians and Trump federations within a few hours.
Accounts dedicated to sharing conspiracy theories said that the claims were somehow the evidence that the Democrats used USAID to finance a 'fake news empire'.
By Wednesday afternoon, Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister and authoritarian leader of Hungary, repeated the claims that swirls in the United States, who wrote on X that payments to Politico somehow 'in principle' the entire left-wing media 'finished'– A viral function that received more that received more than 26 million views.
Soon the idea spread to the Oval Office, where Mr Trump used his social account to criticize the government's news subscriptions – payments that had occurred during his first presidency – as' payouts' for 'creating good stories about The Democrats'.
“This can be the biggest scandal of all, perhaps the biggest in history!” He wrote in All-Caps on Thursday morning when other users demanded criminal investigations.
Karoline Leavitt, the Pers Secretary of the White House, announced that the administration would cancel all Politico subscriptions. On Thursday, the agricultural department said it had canceled its polico subscriptions.
For Russia and China, the American conservative stir was received above USAID with shocked joy.
Both countries, which followed Mr Orban's complaint, have blamed the agency for supporting subversive programs in their country.
Chen Weihua, a prominent desk chef and columnist for the State News organization China Daily, mentioned reports on the financing of the agency as justification for the earlier claims of China. He suggested that the BBC reporters in China were “all bought” by the Central Intelligence Agency and the British Secret Service, MI6.
“If you have any questions why BBC reporters in China continue to smear China and talk BS all those years, you might find answers now,” he wrote on X.
President Vladimir V. Putin van Russia banned USAID subsidies in 2012 and drove out the employees of the agency and accused the United States of the financing of opponents of his rule. (Officials of Republican and Democratic Administrations have argued that the programs have simply promoted civil society in Russia.)
Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, has also ridiculed a series of subsidies that were criticized in the United States and claimed that the underlying goal of the agency was to promote political revolts, which protests in Egypt in 2011 , Ukrainian in 2014 and quote Georgia last year.
The false video that went viral this week and claimed that USAID funded celebrity travel abroad in Russian recurring story of Russia that the United States supports Ukraine with resources that American voters would rather spend at home.
The video seemed to be the work of an influence campaign that is known to researchers as Operation Overload of Matryoshka, after the Russian nesting dolls, according to Clemson's Media Forensics Hub. That work is led by a private company with links to the Kremlin.
The images showed photos or clips from a number of well -known actors who met the leader of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zensky, while a storyteller with a British accent claimed that the actors had received large payments from USAID for the appearance.
Mrs. Jolie, says the narrator, received $ 20 million; Orlando Bloom, $ 8 million; Sean Penn, $ 5 million; and so forth. “This was done to increase the popularity of Zensky in the foreign public, especially in the United States,” the narrator claims. “The involvement of celebrities made it easy to coordinate financing programs for Ukraine during the conflict.”
After the video appeared on the X account, articles about the claims appeared at the locations of at least two Russian news organizations, Tsargrad and Pravda. The video was picked up by a number of accounts that have previously shared Russian disinformation, but soon further extended to Americans who encourage the Trump government. By Thursday, users on Tiktok and the truth of Mr Trump shared Mr. Trump's social platform the video while commentators expressed indignation and called usaid to be eliminated.
There is no proof of payments in one of the programs of the Agency. A spokesperson for E! News also said in a statement that “the video is not authentic and did not arise from E! News.”
The actor Ben Stiller, reportedly paid $ 4 million for a visit to Ukraine, went to social media to try to refute the claim. “These are lies from Russian media,” he wrote on X. “I fully financed my humanitarian trip to Ukraine. There was no financing of USAID and certainly no payment of any kind.”
More conscious supporters of Mr. Musk continues to encourage the billionaire.
They include a Foodservice employee and the veteran of the Army National Guard who was blamed in 2022 for starting a conspiracy theory about American biological arms laboratories in Ukraine. When attacking USAID he wrote this week in Messages on X and Telegram, Mr. Musk had exposed 'an Orwellian dystopia' by describing the supposed support of the Media Agency.
“We live on the basis of lies,” he said.
