Like the bricks has become a symbol of the fake news that circulate on the protests of Los Angeles

What can bricks do? They can be used to make a house, first of all. Or to destroy a police car. Or, again, to create and spread fake news. All with a simple photo. It is always the same Image of a brick shuttle to run for years. The theme is repeated: for some it would be the tool used by the protesters to put the city on fire, placed in a strategic place in advance to maximize the damage. Alleged demonstration of the fact that there is an external will to guide the disorders.

The offending photo has returned to life and this time it was attributed to Protests that are infuriating in Los Angeles As a reaction to the raids of the ICE (the federal immigration agency) that are affecting fear in the population. « Alarm: Organizations financed by Soros They ordered hundreds of brick pallets to be positioned near the facilities of the ICE to be used by democratic militants against agents and eise staff! It is a civil war». This is the message attached to the image and published on X. Number of views: 800 thousand. And it doesn’t matter if a community note – the Collective Fact Checking system used on Musk’s social network and what now it is also arrived on Meta – He reported that it is an out of context photo. The post has already been reconndic by almost ten thousand X users, while the image alone (sometimes accompanied by a identical accompanying phrase) now wanders undisturbed in the rest of the web.

The origin of fake news on bricks

Mind you: the photo is real, it was not made by artificial intelligence. But its origin dates back to more than five years ago. The image of the stacked bricks was taken (and published) For the first time in Malaysia on the Ecommerce site of Building Materials. Description: common brick, 675 pieces for pallets. Cost: 34 cents of Malaysian reply. Pure and innocent trade.
But something changed in 2020, on the occasion of the Protests for the death of George Floyd. It was at that moment that any brick photo became an opportunity to shout at the wolf. No longer construction material but of destruction. And then the following year in Kenosha, where the trial against Kyle Rettenhouse would be celebrated (who in 2019 had killed two demonstrators). And, still in 2022 when the Supreme Court canceled the famous ROE v. Wade. In this case it was the deputy Lauren Boebert who suggests that the bricks had been placed on purpose in favor of demonstrators. False hypothesis, They had been near Capitol Hill for some time.
Finally, the Malaysian bricks are back. This time in Los Angeles. With the cyclical accuses of the organizations financed by George Soros, often the protagonist and victim of uninformative works.

« In these days, it seems that every time there is a protest, the old hoax of the » brick pallets « appears at the right time, » he wrote on the social network Bluesky The Social Media Lab, research center of the Toronto Metropolitan University. « It is a cat grass for the agitators and right -hand scammers ». And not only. According to the New York Timesthe idea of ​​the protest organized from above (and in particular by organizations related to Soros) would have been relaunched several times by social accounts linked to Russia. Also the same philosopher Aleksandr Dugin (nicknamed « Putin’s brain »), known for its anti-western and far-right positions, has relaunched on X a similar idea: « The cells previously created by Soros and the son have been activated. It is a national conspiracy of liberals Not only against Trump but against the American people in general ».

The danger of FA-DA-CE FACT CHECKING

False photos. But also real photos that pass through false. The downside is the image published by San Francisco Chronicle where you can see some members of the National guard – sent by President Trump to quell protests, which has generated a strong Political clash with Governor Gavin Newsom – As they sleep on the ground in a federal building. « You sent your troops here without fuel, food, water or a place to sleep, » wrote the governor of California on X.
Laura Loomer, politics and theoretical of the conspiracy close to the most extreme trumpist wing, attacked: «It seems that @gavinnewsom used one Photos made by artificial intelligence To defame President Trump », He wrote in one post on X.
Others, however, they simply interrogated Grok To ask for the original context of the photo. « The photos probably come from Afghanistan in 2021, during the efforts of evacuation of the National Guard in the context of the Allies Refuge operation, » the chatbot replied. Inventing the fact checking in question in a healthy plant. And it’s not the only one. Chatgpt was also asked by some user For a verification of the facts. Failing also in this case: the chatbot attributed them to the disastrous evacuation of the American army from Afghanistan in 2021, also adding a link. Which, however, refers to one resource that has nothing to do with offending photos.