New: NewsGuard found ads for dozens of major brands unintentionally appearing below viral posts on X advancing false or egregiously misleading claims about the Israel-Hamas war
We're excited to announce that NewsGuard now works on @DuckDuckGo: Get journalistic credibility ratings for news and information websites right in your browser, displayed next to links on #duckduckgo. Download the extension at newsguardtech.com.
From Nov. 13 to Nov. 22, 2023, NewsGuard analysts reviewed programmatic ads that appeared in the feeds below 30 viral tweets that contained false or egregiously misleading information about the war.
These 30 viral tweets were posted by ten of X’s worst purveyors of Israel-Hamas war-related misinformation, and have cumulatively reached an audience of over 92 million viewers, according to X data. On average, each tweet was seen by 3 million people.
A NewsGuard review found that #TikTok’s search feature—which is increasingly being used by young people as a search engine—is regularly feeding users false and misleading claims.
Read NewsGuard's September Misinformation Monitor
NEW: @facebook Pages with millions of followers continue to publish fake COVID-19 cures and conspiracy theories. We've just released a report naming 15 of these misinformation "super-spreaders" that reach 18.6M followers combined: newsguardtech.com/superspreaders (1/6)
A Russian disinformation network boosted the number of “pink slime” outlets — sites that present themselves as independent local news outlets but are instead funded by partisan groups — to 1,265, outnumbering the websites of 1,213 daily newspapers left in the U.S., according to
However, the other half did not feature a Community Note. Ads for major brands such as Pizza Hut, Airbnb, Microsoft, Paramount, and Oracle were found by NewsGuard on posts with and without a Community Note (more on this below).
NewsGuard found that 25 Twitter Blue verified accounts were responsible for 141 tweets containing false, misleading, & unsubstantiated claims in one week.
These tweets were viewed nearly 27M times and received more than 760K likes and retweets during this period.
Read our full
The false or egregiously misleading claims include that the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack against Israel was a “false flag” and that CNN staged footage of an October 2023 rocket attack on a news crew in Israel.
Half of the tweets (15) were flagged with a fact-check by Community Notes, X’s crowd-source fact-checking feature, which under the X policy would have made them ineligible for advertising revenue.
TikTok accounts are deceptively repurposing footage from “Shark Tank” — including fake Mark Cuban endorsements — to create misleading promotions of TikTok Shop products, in an apparent effort to boost sales and earn commissions.
Read it in Reality Check: