Users mistake video game clips for real Israeli war footage on social media

"With every video taken down, ten more are uploaded each day," developer complains.

Kyle Orland – Oct 11, 2023 3:44 PM | 112

A misleadingly captioned Arma 3 video shared on X now sports a "context" note on its real origins. Credit: X / Arma 3

Footage from the 2013 game Arma 3 is spreading virally across multiple social media sites, presented as real spectator video of ongoing military actions between Israelis and Palestinians. The misleading videos are part of a wave of war disinformation that has run rampant across social media and highlights just how realistic the heavily modded game can appear at a glance.

Examples of this trend are not hard to come by. A 22-second clip on X garnered over 10.4 million views as footage of "Israeli helicopters getting smashed." But the clip was originally posted as a YouTube short on October 3, where it was correctly labeled as Arma footage. That didn't stop that same clip from spreading widely among Indian and Turkish Facebook users.

Another X video with millions of views shows Arma 3 footage of a shoulder-mounted rocket launched at a helicopter, labeled as "Hamas fighters shooting down Israel war helicopter in Gaza." X-user Shayan Sardarizadeh has debunked that footage as well as other examples of game footage that have been taken down as of press time.

The original source for the above social media video, which is correctly labeled as Arma footage.

Then there's the TikTok post that features Arma footage with the immediate caption "BREAKING: A large Israeli offensive is underway in retaliation for Hamas attacks." Unfurling the full description reveals that the video was "Filmed with Digital Combat Simulator," a disclaimer that didn't prevent it from temporarily being re-shared by far-right Britain First leader Paul Golding on X.

Ars Video

These are just a few of the dozens of examples of misleading or misrepresented Arma 3 footage that can be found across social media in recent days. While many of the clips in question have either been taken down or amended with fact checks clarifying their simulated sourcing, comments and replies suggest many users are either confused about that sourcing or assume the footage is real at a glance.

An ongoing problem

Since its initial release in 2013, Arma 3 footage has popped up multiple times as real, on-the-ground war reporting. A Russian state news program famously mistook footage from the game as a clip from the conflict in Syria, for instance. And after an Arma 3 clip spread across the Internet in 2020 as a supposed US takedown of Iranian missiles, that same exact clip gained traction again in 2022 as alleged footage from the conflict in Ukraine.

"[Our] efforts to make authentic simulation gameplay [appear] pretty successful... [but] this is definitely not a method we want to use to promote our games," developer Bohemia Interactive told Kotaku of the 2018 Russian news clip.

Another viral *Arma 3* video that has been corrected via community note.

"While it's flattering that Arma 3 simulates modern war conflicts in such a realistic way, we are certainly not pleased that it can be mistaken for real-life combat footage and used as war propaganda," Bohemia Interactive PR Manager Pavel Křižka wrote in a blog post originally published last November (and updated on Tuesday). "We've been trying to fight against such content by flagging these videos to platform providers... but it's very ineffective. With every video taken down, ten more are uploaded each day."

In that same blog post, Bohemia Interactive offers tips for how social media users "can distinguish such in-game videos from real-world footage." These include the use of low resolutions (which obscure some of the blocky polygons in the game), "unnatural" particle effects, and sound effects that "are often distinguishable from reality." Most of these fake videos also lack human fighters, because, "while [Arma 3] can simulate the movement of military vehicles relatively realistically, capturing natural looking humans in motion is still very difficult, even for the most modern of games," Bohemia writes.

Despite those caveats, it's striking how easy it is for consumer-grade hardware and gaming software to create footage that can pass for real war video at a glance. Given that simplicity, Bohemia has been reduced to practically begging its players to "use their game footage responsibly. When sharing such materials, please refrain from using "clickbait" video titles, and always state clearly that the video originated from a video game and is not depicting real-life events."