On 1 March, the day after the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran, X's head of product Nikita Bier said the platform had recorded its biggest ever day for usage.

The following day, he revised that claim, 2 March was actually the new record.

However, as users flocked to X for almost real-time updates on the ongoing conflict in the Gulf, many were being presented with a slew of fake and misleading content which was posted by creators eager to monetise posts.

X's monetisation programme pays users based on the views, likes, and shares their posts attract, an incentive critics say has actively encouraged the spread of fake war footage.

AI-generated videos, fabricated satellite images, recycled footage from previous conflicts, and clips taken from video games, were all presented as recent and real footage from across the region.

The company took action on accounts they detected posting such content, something they were keen to highlight. It announced a 90-day suspension from its creator payment programme for anyone posting AI-generated conflict videos without disclosing they are synthetic.

"Last night, we found a guy in Pakistan that was managing 31 accounts posting AI war videos," Mr Bier said in the first days of the conflict, "All were hacked and the usernames were changed on Feb 27 to 'Iran War Monitor’ or some derivative."

Yet at the same time as X claimed to be taking a hard line on fake user-posted content, its own AI chatbot, Grok, was actively creating and disseminating misinformation.

On the first day of the conflict, 28 February, mentions of Grok jumped to 1.8m from a daily average of 1.27m, data exported by RTÉ from a social media listening tool shows.

Many users were writing to the chatbot, asking it to provide or check claims related to events in the Middle East.