The video, falsely claiming that the United States Agency for International Development was paid by Ben Stiller, Angelina Jolie and other actors millions of dollars to travel to Ukraine seemed to be a clip from E! News, though never appeared on the Entertainment channel.
In fact, the video first appeared on X in a post from an account that researchers have said the spread of Russian misinformation.
Within hours he attracted the attention of Elon Musk, who reprinted it. So did President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr.
They amplified the fake video while Mr. Musk pressured a crusade to close USAID, the agency that has distributed most of the foreign government aid since 1961. Working with Mr. Trump’s blessing as a chief of a Government efficiency campaigns, Mr. Musk and others in the administration have taken over the headquarters of the agency, frozen grants and staff announced that almost everyone will be rested.
The dismantling of the agency has been accompanied by a stream of anger online by right -wing influencers and accounts that are promoting false claims and conspiracy thinking.
While some politicians and voters have long questioned the value of foreign aid, those who attack the agency have often distorted facts and, willingly or unwittingly, embraced as all that can help justify USAID targeting
This includes Mr. Musk himself, who used the platform he took over in 2022 as a megaphone for trying to reduce federal bureaucracy. On Sunday, Mr. Musk called it “a criminal organization”, without explaining the basis for such an accusation.
“He is using ignorance of how the government works and the lack of supervision for everything he is doing,” said Mike Rothschild, a misinformation researcher and author of “laser Jewish space”, a book on conspiracy theories. “All this is extremely dangerous and it is happening just before us.”
The attack furnace emphasized once again how many Republican views have been increasingly converged with propaganda emanating from the Kremlin or narratives associated with its international goals, especially on the platform of Mr. Musk. The fake video for celebrities seemed to be the work of an influence campaign that has produced dozens of similar counterfeits regarding the Russian war in Ukraine, according to the Clemson University Forensic Center.
“Russian anti-ekraine propaganda has fully infiltrated certain communities in X,” said Darren L. Linvill, a researcher there, who traced the spread of the clip falsified by its origin in X through a network of accounts that has previously distributed fake Russian.
“Given how long Musk spends on his platform,” said Dr. Linvill, “it was probably inevitable that some fabricated Russian message would resonate with, and that seemed almost created to do so.”
Not even Mr. Musk and Donald Trump Jr. did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
X did not immediately respond to a comment request about the disinformation of USAID misinformation on the platform, though it has added a note to posts sharing the video for the actors, stressing that it is not true.
Much of the online rage this week has focused on numerous USAID grants, information that has been publicly available for years.
A viral claim, for example, began after an X account with more than half a million followers suggested that Politico, the Washington News website, had received more than $ 8 million from USAID
That was not true. The website had received about $ 44,000 from USAID for subscriptions in its publication of the environmental premium and energy for two years, and more than $ 8 million in reconciliation from a variety of agencies, including the Energy Department.
Regardless, the claim was rapidly shot on social media, as influencing and politicians with even more followers strengthened the idea.
This set a round of other fraudulent claims about USAID giving money to the BBC and the New York Times. (The agency instead gave it to an independent charity that shares a name with the BBC. The most viral claim about the New York Times was based on an incorrect search for government registries that included grants for unrelated groups but with similar sound, like the University of New York.
The facts failed to reach an important audience on the Internet, but the misinformation was raised by podcasters, Trump’s prominent politicians and allies within hours.
Accounts dedicated to the sharing of conspiracy theories said the claims were somewhat evidence that Democrats used USAID to fund a “false news empire”.
Until Wednesday afternoon, Victor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary and the authoritarian leader, echoed the claims rotating in the United States, writing on X that Politico’s payment somehow funded “essentially all left-wing media in Hungary”- a viral post that received more than 26 million views.
Soon the idea spread to the Oval office, where Mr. Trump used his social truth account to criticize government news subscriptions – payments that had also taken place during his first presidency – as “payments” to create stories good for Democrats. “
“This may be the biggest scandal for everyone, maybe the biggest in history!” He wrote in all hats Thursday morning while other users sought criminal investigations.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, announced that the administration would cancel all Politico’s subscriptions. On Thursday, the Department of Agriculture said it had canceled its policy reconciliations.
For Russia and China, American conservative riots over USAID have met with shaken joy.
The two nations, echoing Mr. Orban’s complaint, have blamed the agency for supporting subversive programs in their countries.
Chen Weihua, a prominent office chief and columnist for the state -run China Daily News Organization, mentioned reports on agency funds as excuses for China’s earlier claims. 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 questions why BBC reporters in China continue to stain China all these years and talk BS, you can find answers now,” he wrote on X.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia banned USAID grants in 2012 and expelled agency workers, accusing the United States of financing opponents for his rule. (Officials from Republican and Democratic administrations have argued that programs simply promoted civil society in Russia.)
Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ridiculed a series of grants that were criticized in the United States, and claimed that the basic goal of the agency was to promote political uprisings, citing protests in Egypt in 2011, Ukraine in 2014 and Georgia last year.
The fake video that went viral this week claiming that the famous USAID -funded trip fits into Russia’s repeated narrative that the United States safely supports Ukraine with resources that American voters would spend better at home.
The video seemed to be the work of an influential campaign to researchers like Overload or Matryoshka, behind Russian Nesting dolls, according to the Clemson Forensics Center. This work is led by a private company with the Kremlin.
The footage showed pictures or clips of a number of well -known actors meeting with Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelensky, while a narrator with a British accent claimed that the actors had received large USAID payments for the appearance.
Ms. Jolie, the narrator says, received $ 20 million; Orlando Bloom, $ 8 million; Sean Penn, $ 5 million; and so on. “This was done to increase Zelensky’s popularity among foreign audiences, especially in the United States,” the narrator claims. “The involvement of celebrities made it easy to coordinate funding programs for Ukraine during the conflict.”
After the video appeared on the X account, the articles about her claims appeared on the pages of at least two Russian news organizations, Tsargrad and Pravda. The video was chosen by a number of accounts that previously shared Russian misinformation, but soon expanded beyond this to Americans who cheered the Trump administration. Until Thursday, users in Tiktok and Mr. Trump’s social platform had shared the video after commentators express anger and call for USAID to be eliminated.
There is no evidence of payments in any of the agency programs. A spokesman for E! News also said in a statement that “the video is not authentic and does not originate from the news!”
Actor Ben Stiller, reportedly paid $ 4 million for a visit to Ukraine, took on social media to try to refute the request. “These are lies coming from Russian media,” he wrote on X. “I fully self-financed my humanitarian journey to Ukraine. There were no funds from USAID and of course no payment of any kind.”
Mr. Musk’s best conspiracy supporters continue to cheer the billionaire anyway.
They include a food service worker and the Army National Guard veteran, which was blamed in 2022 for the launch of a conspiracy theory regarding American biological weapons laboratories. In the USAID attack, he wrote in posts on X and telegram this week, Mr. Musk had exhibited “an Orwellian Dystop” by detailing the support of the media agency.
“We live on a foundation of lies,” he said.