TL;DR
X will suspend users from its creator revenue programme for 90 days if they post AI-generated war videos without disclosure. A second offence triggers a permanent ban. The move follows a flood of fake battle footage during the Iran conflict, with one AI video of Iranian rockets viewed 70 million times.
Elon Musk’s X is cracking down on AI-generated war footage after the first days of the Iran conflict were marked by a torrent of fake battle scenes across social media.
The platform, which has roughly half a billion monthly active users, announced on Tuesday night that creators who post AI-generated videos of armed conflict without a disclosure label will lose access to revenue sharing for 90 days. A second violation results in a permanent ban from the programme.
Fake Footage Reached Millions
The scale of AI-generated misinformation during the conflict has been significant. BBC Verify identified an AI-created video showing Iranian rockets pursuing and shooting down a US jet that was viewed 70 million times. Another clip used AI to replace smoke from a real missile strike with a fake fireball several times larger.
On Instagram and Facebook, a clip claiming to show a “huge conflagration” after Iran destroyed a US airbase in Riyadh turned out to be 18-month-old footage from an Israeli strike on a Yemeni oil refinery.
Users can earn hundreds of dollars monthly through X’s advertising model by building large followings, which creates a financial incentive to produce shocking viral content — real or not.
Wider Misinformation Concerns
Full Fact, the UK fact-checking organisation, warned that AI is “increasingly turbocharging the spread of misinformation on social media.”
Steve Nowottny, Full Fact’s editor, noted examples including fake images of an aircraft carrier and the Burj Khalifa on fire, plus a fabricated image of Ayatollah Khamenei’s body. “Even when AI images seem low quality, or still have a visible watermark on them, we often see them shared at scale,” he said.
Sam Stockwell, a researcher at the UK’s Centre for Emerging Technology and Security, identified a new trend: users asking AI chatbots to verify whether videos are genuine. “Unfortunately chatbots are not very good at assessing real-time events,” he said. People then post the chatbot’s incorrect assessments as evidence something is real.
Looking Forward
X’s new policy targets the financial incentive behind fake content but only covers videos — not images — and only those depicting armed conflicts. Whether this narrow scope proves sufficient as AI-generated media becomes cheaper and easier to produce remains an open question. Meta has not yet announced equivalent measures for Instagram and Facebook.