No, CNN Didn’t Tweet About ‘Bernie Gores’ Being Killed Twice, Tweets Are Fake!

The screenshots of the fabricated CNN tweets use a photo of controversial YouTuber Jordie Jordan.

A screenshot of two tweets, purportedly shared by news agency CNN’s Ukraine and Afghanistan accounts, noting the demise of their journalist 'Bernie Gores' in an attack by Taliban in Afghanistan as well as the “first American casualty” of an activist in Ukraine is doing the rounds.

The claim comes in the backdrop of Russia firing artilleries, missiles killing civilians including children in Ukraine.

However, we found that the claim is not true. The Quint found that neither of the accounts exist on Twitter and that the person in the photograph is a controversial gaming streamer named Jordie Jordan, who also goes by the name ‘Wingsofredemption’.

Catch all the live updates on the Russia-Ukraine tensions here.

CLAIM

The screenshots are being shared to claim that news organisation CNN fabricated the story about the man’s demise, as CNN accounts from different countries had tweeted the news of his demise twice, in times of crisis in both Afghanistan and Ukraine.

We found that an unverified account by the name of ‘CNN Bosnia and Herzegovina’ also shared the same person’s photo, calling him their journalist who was captured by Belarussian soldiers.

More posts with the same claim can be seen here, here and here.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

First, we looked for the accounts mentioned in the screenshots – ‘CNNUKR’ and ‘CNNAfghan’ – and found that neither of these accounts existed anymore.

This would be out of the ordinary for an account affiliated with an international news organisation.

Next, we went to CNN’s website and looked up ‘Bernie Gores’, which returned only one unrelated result but had no mention of a journalist or an activist being killed in conflict.

We then cropped the screenshots in the claim to isolate the man’s photograph in order to run a reverse image search. On Google, we came across a website called ‘Scroller,’ which carried multiple images of the same man. The page was titled ‘Wingsofredemptionwiki.’

Taking a cue from here, we looked up ‘Wingsofredemption’ on Google and looked at images.

Here, we came across the same photo shared as that of one Jordie Jordan.

From here, we looked at Jordie Jordan’s or WingsofRedemption’s YouTube channel, where we found livestreams of gameplay with Jordan visible in the video.

In one such livestream, Jordan can be seen reacting to his audience’s messages and comments two hours and eleven minutes into the livestream.

Clearly, CNN did not tweet about a journalist or activist called ‘Bernie Gores’ being killed in Afghanistan or Ukraine. The accounts that tweeted the fabricated information have now been suspended and the photograph used in the tweets is that of YouTuber and gamer Jordie Jordan.

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