Case history of a Suzanne Downing lie

Watch the video below in which Suzanne Downing, who is about to launch a new right-wing Alaska propaganda site, propagates a lie that MSNBC used video of a protest scene from 2017 and claimed it was from the No Kings protest Saturday in the Boston Common.

Downing, 71, who calls herself a respected journalist, said on Facebook that the incident is an example of the mainstream media lying to people.

“Look it, the mainstream media isn’t just sloppy. It’s dishonest. And this latest stunt from MSNBC proves it once again,” said Downing.

“MSNBC got caught red-handed showing fake footage for No Kings protests. They are pure propaganda!” Downing wrote.

She’s wrong.

She posted the video saying the protest footage was fake at 8:14 a.m. Sunday and has not retracted her false claims, which are based on false claims spread and retracted within hours by Grok, the AI chatbox on X, the site that used to be Twitter.

“In responses to user queries on X shortly after the broadcast, Grok misidentified the clip as being from 2017, based on superficial similarities to archived footage. This error was later corrected in subsequent Grok responses after further verification, but not before it was amplified by users on X,” according to the AI program.

Here is one of many Grok retractions that said the video was taken Saturday, not in 2017.

As of Monday morning, there were more than 200 comments on Downing’s video, which had been shared more than 700 times. Many of the commenters thought Downing was telling the truth about faked footage and some said they thought other coverage of the No Kings protests was faked, including in Anchorage.

Downing, as is often the case, provided no sources except “awesome people on X,” the site owned by Elon Musk.

Her refusal to correct mistakes, apologize or explain her errors is a hallmark of her work.

Downing, who famously claimed that Donna Arduin was the best dressed woman in Juneau, quit the GOP Must Read Alaska blog over a political dispute with owner Jon Faulkner, who supports Treg Taylor for governor.

The best explanation of how Downing was led astray on the Boston video comes from BBC Verify, which has demonstrated that the AI chatbot spread and later retracted the lie. Downing spread the lie, but did not retract it.

“The artificial intelligence chatbot Grok was wrongly claiming on X that aerial footage of crowds at an anti-Trump protest in Boston on Saturday was from 2017. We’ve broken down why Grok incorrectly came to say it was old and how this claim spread online, explained how we used reverse image searches to help debunk it and consulted with an expert to explain why AI chatbots sometimes ‘hallucinate,’” BBC Verify journalist Thomas Copeland wrote.

“Grok’s false claim, which it made repeatedly, appears to have been sourced from a proposed but unapproved Community Note attached to one post with the video,” BBC Verify said. “Community Notes - a feature on X designed to allow volunteers to add corrections or context to posts - says it was ‘proposed by an experimental AI contributor’ and asks users to vote on whether it is helpful.”

“The unapproved Community Note lists three links about 2017 protests in Boston, but none support the claim that the aerial footage is old,” Copeland wrote.

“Screenshots of Grok’s claim and the unapproved Community Note were shared widely, including by pro-Trump influencers, as evidence of protestors misleading the public about the size of the “No Kings” demonstrations which took place across the US.”

On X, Downing praised the false Community Note and said “good job” for “calling out MSNBC as frauds.”

Despite the facts that show she was wrong, Downing has not retracted, apologized or explained the numerous false claims and conclusions she made from unreliable sources.

This is what she said:

“Let’s talk about what MSNBC just did. What a stunt. On Saturday during their live coverage of the No Kings protest, MSNBC aired what they claimed was live footage from the Boston Commons (sic).

“The only problem it wasn’t from 2025. It was actually footage from 2017. They recycled old footage from an August 2017 broadcast of AM Joy, which was Joy Reid’s show back then. That clip showed about 40,000 people packed into the Boston Commons (sic) for a left-wing counterprotest against a conservative free speech rally that was taking place that day. Same aerial shot. Same crowd. Same buildings. Just a narration that pretended it was current.

“Awesome people on X caught it almost immediately. Community notes researchers ran some reverse image searches and matched it right back to the 2017 protest. Well, MSNBC has since deleted it, delisted it. But it still exists in third-party embeds. Once they got called out, they just kind of took it down, pretended it didn’t happen. No apology. No correction. Just gone. And that’s the problem. This isn’t journalism. It’s narrative management.

“They wanted to make it look like Boston was packed wall to wall with No Kings protesters. And it was. It was just that they decided to use some old footage. Lazy. The real footage is out there and it shows that it was a very robust protest yesterday. But they got caught red-handed lying. And the question is ‘How many of the people who actually marched in these No Kings protests are MSNBC consumers of news?’ They never even know that they’re lied to. Look it, the mainstream media isn’t just sloppy. It’s dishonest. And this latest stunt from MSNBC proves it once again.”

There is ample evidence of laziness and sloppiness and dishonesty here, but the network is not the culprit.