On October 11, an anonymous X account, atTalibanPRD, posted a video of a small boy covered in dust and crying for his dead sisters.
The video has more than half a million views and some 3,000 interactions.
AtTalibanPRD promoted the video, writing:
“A little boy in #Gaza grieving for his sisters sees no distinction between an #Israeli soldier and a Western journalist spewing #Zionist propaganda. One murders with a rifle, while the other murders with a pen. #FreeGaza #FreePalestine”
That is false.
The video is of a Syrian boy filmed after the bombing of Aleppo in 2014. It has no connection with the current hostilities in Gaza.
Other users on X debunked the atTalibanPRD post using the Community Notes tool, which X features as the company’s way of fighting disinformation and propaganda.
That tool, however, did not appear to be working properly at the time of this writing. The “Find out more” button leads to an error page, and a click on the correction context yields a message stating “twitter refused to connect”, as seen in the screenshots below.
Additionally, the Community Note tool appears less effective than the disinformation it is designed to debunk. The correction context has very few views and interactions compared to the original post by atTalibanPRD.
That anonymous X account at times switches its username from “The Taliban Public Relations Department” to “#FreePalestine”, while retaining its X handle as “@TalibanPRD.”
On October 8, that same X account posted the false claim that the Taliban has reached out to the leadership of Jordan, Iran and Iraq to inform them that its forces will be joining Hamas to fight against Israel. The Voice of America’s Afghan service debunked that claim.
