News Summary

• Fake photos of Rep. Ilhan Omar circulated less than a day after President Donald Trump falsely suggested that she had staged an attack on herself.
• One widely circulated image simply replaces a woman Omar’s attacker posed with in a separate Facebook photo with the congresswoman.
• Even when the images weren’t taken to be definitively real, they still were effective at creating some useful amount of uncertainty about what might actually be true, and discouraging people from trying to find out.
• “People have a very difficult time figuring out what is real and what is true,” says Dmytro Iarovyi, an associate professor at the Kyiv School of Economics.