As the United States and Iran exchange fresh strikes across the Middle East, a parallel war of misinformation has taken hold on social media platforms, with widely shared videos falsely presented as footage of current attacks on American military bases and key waterways.

Fact-checkers have identified several prominent examples of recycled or entirely unrelated footage circulating as evidence of the latest fighting. One video, viewed hundreds of thousands of times, purported to show a US military base in Jordan in flames — but geolocation analysis traced it to footage from a drone attack on the US consulate in Dubai, filmed around six months ago. Another clip, shared with captions claiming it showed Iranian forces striking American bases in Jordan with heavy missiles, was in reality filmed in Ryazan, southeast of Moscow, following a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian oil refinery last year. A third video, falsely described as Iranian shelling of the US consulate in Kuwait, was traced to a SWAT operation explosion at a house in Arlington, Virginia.

Perhaps the most striking case involves the Strait of Hormuz — a strategically vital waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman through which a significant share of the world's oil passes. Amid heightened tensions there, users across X, Facebook and Instagram shared footage they claimed showed Iran detonating naval mines in the strait to intimidate the United States. A reverse image search revealed the video to be 68 years old: it shows