Clickbait falsely claims stars supporting victims of strike on Iran school
- Published on March 4, 2026 at 16:28
- 3 min read
- By Sahas WIJEWARDENE, AFP USA
Iranian officials say more than 150 people were killed when an air strike struck a school in Minab, in the country's southern Hormozgan province. With investigations into the incident underway, Facebook posts are weaponizing photos of celebrities and top athletes to falsely claim large donations are flowing to the victims. These posts are part of a wider pattern of AI-generated clickbait that invents charitable acts to drive engagement.
"Ilia Malinin has donated his entire $10 million in recent bonuses and sponsorship earnings to provide emergency relief and medical aid following the tragic elementary school strike in southern Iran" claims a March 1, 2026 Facebook post sharing a picture of the American Olympic figure skater alongside images showing debris and broken buildings.
The text continues with a quote allegedly attributed to Malinin: "I've seen the reports about those innocent children in the south, and I promised myself that if I ever had the chance to help those caught in the crossfire of this war, I would step up."
Posts attributed the identical quote to other athletes purportedly making donations including tennis star Coco Gauff, former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow and the WNBA's Sophie Cunningham.
Others duplicated the claim while swapping in the names of musicians such as Eminem, Britney Spears, Cardi B, Brandi Carlyle, Post Malone and Neil Diamond.
The posts gained traction after the United States and Israel launched a wave of strikes on February 28 against targets in Iran which killed the country's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sparking celebration and mourning demonstrations across the world.
Iranian authorities said one of these strikes hit a school in the southern town of Minab. Neither the US nor Israel has said it was behind the strike, although US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on March 2 that the Pentagon was investigating. AFP has been unable to independently confirm the death toll or have access to the site.
Misinformation about the war in the Middle East is spreading quickly and AFP has debunked several posts misrepresenting footage purporting to show the conflict. The claims that celebrities are donating money to help those associated with the school are similarly false.
Keyword searches on Google yielded no credible evidence that any of the public figures mentioned in the posts had pledged money or made the statements attributed to them.
Similar claims appropriating celebrities' likenesses are routinely shared as clickbait to drive engagement, often by networks operating outside the United States.
An examination of the page transparency information made public on Facebook shows that many of the accounts sharing the school donation claim appear to be run from Vietnam, a country linked to content farms which profit from viral traffic.
The posts lead to articles which contain homoglyphs -- characters that look similar but are encoded differently -- pointing to the use of artificial intelligence, as AFP has reported in previous fact-checks.
AFP reached out to Cunningham's publicist, as well as agents for Eminem and Cardi B., but no response was forthcoming.
AFP previously debunked AI slop content here, here and here.
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