There is a grim rhythm to how conflicts now unfold online. Within hours of any major military engagement, clips surface on X, Telegram, and Facebook claiming to show real airstrikes, downed aircraft, or battlefield chaos. A significant portion of them are gameplay footage from a Czech military simulation game released in 2013. It is happening again.
As the United States and Israel carried out joint military strikes on Iran, according to journalism watchdog PressProgress, a video depicting two jets dropping munitions was shared on 28 February by a self-described MAGA account on X called TheUnHeard_One. The clip was framed as authentic combat footage from the strikes. It was not. It came from Arma 3, a hyper-realistic military simulator developed by Czech studio Bohemia Interactive.
The video would likely have remained buried in the noise of X's feeds, but it was picked up and reshared to 84,000 followers by Ben Mulroney, the interim host of Global News' flagship political affairs programme The West Block and son of former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. PressProgress independently traced the clip to a South Korean YouTube gaming channel called Battle Dragon, which had posted a virtually identical video in December 2024. The channel describes the clip as footage of a Sukhoi Su-57 fighter jet. None of the nations involved in the current conflict — the United States, Israel, or Iran — are known to possess or use that Russian-made aircraft.
As PressProgress noted, Mulroney has previously claimed he is "not a journalist," a position he appeared to expect would provide some cover for careless sharing. The difficulty with that argument is that Mulroney is simultaneously hosting The West Block, a widely-watched political affairs programme on one of Canada's largest networks. After the error was identified, PC Gamer reports that Mulroney's original source said they had simply "liked the video" and complained about being fact-checked.
The strategic implications for public trust in media are significant. This is not an isolated incident or a quirk of a single credulous sharer. Arma gameplay masquerading as real combat footage has been plaguing the game's own creators for more than a decade, with new fakes appearing "with the start of any major armed conflict across the globe," according to Pavel Křižka, a spokesperson for Bohemia Interactive. Clips from the game have been passed off as real footage in conflicts ranging from Syria and Iraq to Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, and Ukraine.
In May 2025, the Pakistani government's official X account posted a propaganda video that led with an anti-aircraft gun shooting at a jet, a clip taken directly from Arma 3. Pakistan's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which brands itself a "Fact Checker," shrugged off the Arma clip as having been used "for reference." That a government agency could publish such a justification with a straight face says something about how normalised the problem has become.
The game's ubiquity, its accessibility on even fairly old computers, and a community of dedicated fans adding niche military equipment via modifications have made it a remarkably effective digital tool for generating war hoaxes. Bohemia has worked to combat the spread by partnering with major news agencies. The studio found the most effective approach is to cooperate with leading media outlets and fact-checkers such as AFP and Reuters, who have the reach and capacity to fight fake footage more effectively than platform takedown requests. For every video removed, ten more are uploaded each day.
The fairness argument cuts both ways here, and it deserves honest treatment. Those who share this content are not always acting in bad faith. Conflict zones are chaotic; information moves faster than verification; and the graphics in Arma 3, especially when footage is deliberately degraded in quality or filmed from a screen to mimic a shaky phone camera, can fool a casual viewer. As researcher Claire Wardle of Brown University's Information Futures Lab told AFP, it is "a reminder of how easy it is to fool people," and with the improvement of video game visuals, computer-generated images can at first glance appear real. Sympathy for the average social media user is warranted.
What is less forgivable is the conduct of those who hold media platforms or public credibility. The failure here is not merely technical. As platforms like Meta and X disengage from top-down content moderation and professional fact-checkers who could spot Arma gameplay easily, it is unclear whether even Bohemia's cooperative efforts with news organisations will be enough to stem the fear and outrage that scary-looking viral clips can spread. The incentive structures of social media reward speed over accuracy, and until that changes, every new conflict will produce a fresh wave of convincing-looking fakes.
There are practical steps that Bohemia itself has outlined. Very low resolution is a tell: even dated smartphones can produce HD video, and fake clips are usually intentionally pixelated and blurry to hide their video game origins. Footage that takes place in the dark or at night is another warning sign, as the darkness hides the game's insufficient level of detail. These are not infallible guides, but they give any viewer a starting point for scepticism.
The deeper issue is one of accountability. Technology has genuinely made verification harder, and that is a legitimate challenge for journalists and audiences alike. But the answer to that challenge is more rigour, not less. A military simulator producing footage indistinguishable from a warzone is, in one sense, a tribute to how far computer graphics have come. In every other sense, it is a warning that the information environment surrounding real conflicts is now irreparably polluted, and that those with platforms, however they choose to define themselves professionally, bear a responsibility to check before they share.