Gaming: War Thunder Clip Shared On Social Media As Footage Of The War In...

The footage purports to show a US warship and Iranian fighter plane: but it doesn't.

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The current conflict between the US/Israel and Iran has seen an abundance of footage circulating online: some shared directly from official sources, some legitimate, and some of more questionable origin. A viral example of the latter is a clip that claims to show an American ship shooting down an Iranian fighter jet, which has now been debunked as footage from the military simulation game War Thunder.

The clip has been shared by various accounts on platforms such as X, with this example garnering over seven million views. An apparently damaged US warship can be seen with all guns blazing, firing at a nearby Iranian jet, eventually hitting the jet and causing it to explode and crash near the ship. The post was shared by figures including the Republican Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, in which he captioned the clip with "Bye bye" (Abbott has since deleted this).

It is strange that this game footage seems to have convinced some people—as a community note on X points out, no Iranian plane attack on a US ship (at least of the type depicted in the clip) has occurred during the conflict. Iran did claim on March 1 it had struck the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier, but this has been denied by the Pentagon.

Nevertheless the clip acquired such currency that the French international news agency Agence France-Presse investigated, and found that the footage almost certainly originates from War Thunder and shows the USS Tennessee: a dreadnought built in the 1910s that was decommissioned in 1947. The supposed Iranian fighter plane appears to be a Messerschmitt Me 163B-1a Komet. In other words, these are military vehicles that were used in World War 2.

Konstantin Govorun, Gaijin Entertainment's head of PR, confirmed to AFP that "yes, this looks like War Thunder footage."

This is not an exceptional incident, but a trend in contemporary warfare. Last year, as war loomed in the Middle East, clips of both Arma 3 and War Thunder were used as propaganda, with even the Israeli military getting involved to clarify "the footage is fake."

Arma 3 especially is often mis-used in this way, thanks to its realistic visual style. Developer Bohemia Interactive said in 2023 it is "disheartening for us to see the game we all love being used in this way", and after repeated instances of it happ

Source: PC Gamer