Our work is more important than ever. Please support us by becoming a Premium Member. What happened: Almost immediately after news broke that an American Airlines passenger jet collided with an Army helicopter near the U. Capitol, leaving no survivors, conspiracy accounts on X and other platforms began spreading wild theories and false claims about the tragedy.
Fake DEI connection: Far-right and pro-Kremlin accounts falsely claimed that one of the pilots on the Army helicopter was transgender woman Jo Ellis, who was recently profiled on Smerconish.
As they write in American social networks, the chaotic flight path of Black Hawk may indicate that the transgender could be under hallucinations during the flight.
Actually: Ellis, who is openly transgender, was not among those killed. Two of the three soldiers aboard the Army helicopter have been publicly identified as of Jan. Ellis wrote on her Facebook page on Jan. Please report any accounts or posts you see. Right-wing X account endlibtyranny stated on Jan. The fact that CNN had pre-written articles about the crash before it happened is disturbing and raises serious questions about their journalistic integrity.
Actually: A NewsGuard review of the source code metadata for the two CNN articles cited in the false claims shows that they were published after the crash β one at p. The crash occurred at p. SEO experts, including from Google itself, have previously noted that Google News search results can sometimes display inaccurate time stamps. A deliberate attack? In the hours following the crash, some far-right accounts claimed without substantiation that the incident was intentional and aimed at targeting someone with insider government knowledge.
