Do you believe every fake claim that appears on your social media feed that confirms your biases?
Thomas Massie went on Tucker Carlson's podcast and claimed that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security set up its official X account in Israel using an Israeli IP address and an app purchased from the Israeli App Store, and that Congress needs to open an investigation into it.
There's just one problem. The claim is based on a screenshot that was fabricated.
The image went viral in November showing the DHS Twitter page listed as based in Tel Aviv, created July 2008, connected via the Israel App Store, and it got 39 million views and hundreds of thousands of likes before anyone looked closely at it.
The screenshot didn't have the gray checkmark that X puts on every single verified government account without exception, and the person who originally posted it later appeared to admit they made the whole thing up.
X's own head of product came out and called it fake news directly, confirming that the DHS Twitter account was deliberately excluded from the location feature for security reasons and never showed any location data at all.