Sydney Shooting Sparks Baseless ‘Crisis Actor’ Claims
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Survivor of Hanukkah Massacre in Australia Smeared as a ‘Crisis Actor’
By Mascha Wolf and Sofia Rubinson
What happened: Anti-Israel social media accounts are claiming that a survivor of the deadly attack on the Jewish community in Sydney, Australia, was a “crisis actor,” pointing to two photos as supposed proof. “Crisis actor” is a term used by conspiracy theorists to allege that someone is an actor paid to deceive the public by posing as a victim to a tragic event.
Context: On Dec. 14, two gunmen opened fire at a crowd celebrating the first night of Hanukkah on Bondi Beach in Sydney. At least 15 people were killed and 40 people hospitalized, according to news reports.
Arsen Ostrovsky, head of the Australia Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, was among those injured, sustaining a grazing bullet wound to the head.
A closer look: In the aftermath of the attack, anti-Israel and antisemitic social media users spread an authentic image of Ostrovsky with blood on his face, along with a response from X’s AI tool Grok to a question about the authenticity of the image. Grok’s response said, “Yes, the image appears staged.” Some social media users also circulated an AI-generated image created by Google’s Nano Banana Pro model showing blood being painted on Ostrovsky’s face, presenting it as real.
Bloody lie: Citing Grok, the accounts claimed that a viral photo of Ostrovsky’s bloodied face was staged.
X account @JeffreyxEpstein, a “parody account” referencing the disgraced financier, posted a response from Grok stating that the photo “appears staged or fake” and that “the ‘blood’ has an unnaturally bright, glossy red hue that’s more consistent with corn syrup-based fake blood or paint used in movies.” The user added the caption: “The blood is fake. Grok confirmed it’s staged.” The post received 347,200 views and 3,400 likes in one day.
Actually: Ostrovsky is seen in verified news footage with head injuries, and NewsGuard has previously reported how Grok is prone to hallucinations and the dissemination of false claims.
Australian broadcast news channel 9News interviewed Ostrovsky at the scene, where he gave a detailed account of the attack and was seen wearing a facial bandage, with dried blood visible along his face and neck.
Seeing red: Social media accounts also circulated a photo supposedly depicting Ostrovsky with red paint getting applied to his face to make it appear as blood.
Pro-Iran account @HussainShafiei posted the image and stated, “Professional Victim getting his make up done and then going to work.” The post received 2,830 views and 115 likes in under one day.
Actually: The photo was AI-generated by Google’s Nano Banana Pro model, according to Google’s AI detection feature.
A NewsGuard analysis performed using Google’s own Gemini AI found that the image contains Google’s SynthID digital watermark, a machine-readable pattern that allows detection models to identify AI images produced by the model. This indicates that a user generated the image using Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro image generator.
The photo shows obvious signs of AI generation, including distorted lettering on Ostrovsky’s shirt and warped vehicles in the background.
NewsGuard sent an emailed request for comment to the Australia Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, but did not receive an immediate response. X and Google also did not respond to NewsGuard emails seeking comment on the use of their AI models to spread this baseless claim.
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Why is the Press Ignoring the Root Cause of the Obamacare Insurance Crisis?
When President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, he promised that premium subsidies would make it possible for middle class families who did not have employer-provided insurance to buy insurance in the new Obamacare marketplace. It was a great step forward in dealing with a healthcare system that was forcing millions of Americans to forego basic care or end up going into bankruptcy after a cancer diagnosis or even a visit to the emergency room.
However, at the time, some skeptics, me included, predicted that while Obamacare made insurance available to millions of these families, the law did little to curb the galloping cost of medical care that continually outpaced inflation. Therefore, it was not a permanent solution to America’s health care crisis. Unless and until we stopped treating healthcare as just another consumer product, rather than life and death must-have that requires the government to regulate prices to protect powerless consumers, the cost of everything from prescription drugs to MRIs to hospital stays will continue to be two, three or four times what it is in every other country. And the insurance premiums meant to pay for all of that will continue to skyrocket.
Now that that has turned out to be true, where is the reporting explaining why that’s happening?
Instead, we’re only reading stories casting the Republicans as heartless because they won’t continue to provide the so-called “enhanced” subsidies that Democrats enacted in 2021. That was when they used the cover of the COVID crisis to provide what they called a “temporary” COVID-related increase in subsidies.
The subsidy increase had nothing to do with COVID, and, as we now know, calling it temporary was a ruse. The need to increase the subsidies was the inevitable result of Obamacare’s failure to curb American healthcare profiteering that continues to drive costs up at a rate higher than wages or than any other consumer product. True, the Republicans – as beholden to health industry lobbyists as the Democrats – haven’t presented a cost control solution either. And they’ve ignored the problem entirely by opposing Obamacare’s effort since 2010 to make insurance affordable but without offering an alternative. Yet why isn’t the press asking the Democrats why what they said in 2021 was a “temporary” COVID-related increase in the subsidies now must be extended to deal with what everyone seems to agree is a health insurance cost crisis?
P.S. We’ll soon see that the coming pain isn’t confined to Obamacare insurance. As health care prices continue to soar, those with employer-provided insurance are about to see their out of pocket costs and co-pays create the same crisis for a far broader swathe of American families.
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