Since protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles began, false and misleading claims about the ongoing demonstrations have spread on text-based social networks. Outright lies posted directly to social media mixed with misinformation spread through established channels by the White House as Donald Trump dramatically escalated federal intervention. The stream of undifferentiated real and fake information has painted a picture of the city that forks from reality.

Parts of Los Angeles have seen major protests over the past four days against intensified immigration raids by the US president’s administration. On Saturday, dramatic photos from downtown Los Angeles showed cars set aflame amid confrontations with law enforcement. Many posts promoted the perception that mayhem and violence had overtaken the entirety of Los Angeles, even though confrontations with law enforcement and vandalism remained confined to a small part of the sprawling city. Trump has deployed 2,000 members of the national guard to the city without requesting consent from California’s governor Gavin Newsom, which provoked the state to sue for an alleged violation of sovereignty. The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has also ordered the US military to deploy approximately 700 Marines to the city.

Amid the street-level and legal conflicts, misinformation is proliferating. Though lies have long played a part in civil and military conflicts, social media often acts as an accelerant, with facts failing to spread as quickly as their counterparts, a dynamic that has played out with the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, a devastating hurricane in North Carolina and the coronavirus pandemic.

Among the most egregious examples were conservative and pro-Russian accounts circulating a video of Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, from before the protests with the claim that she incited and supported the protests, which have featured Mexican flags, according to the misinformation watchdog Newsguard. The misleading posts – made on Twitter/X by conservative commentator Benny Johnson on pro-Trump sites such as WLTReport.com or Russian state-owned sites such as Rg.ru – have received millions of views, according to the organization. Sheinbaum in fact told reporters on 9 June: “We do not agree with violent actions as a form of protest … We call on the Mexican community to act pacifically.”

A post about bricks stirs a mixture of real and fake news

Conspiratorial conservatives are grasping at familiar bogeymen. A post to X on Saturday claiming that “Soros-funded organizations” had dropped off pallets of bricks near Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facilities received more than 9,500 retweets and was viewed more than 800,000 times. Democratic megadonor George Soros appears as a consistent specter in rightwing conspiracy theories, and the post likewise attributed the supply drop to LA mayor, Karen Bass, and California governor, Gavin Newsom.

“It’s Civil War!!” the post read.

The photo of stacked bricks originates from a Malaysian construction supply company, and the hoax about bricks being supplied to protesters has spread repeatedly since the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the US. X users appended a “community note” fact-checking the tweet. X’s native AI chatbot, Grok, also provided fact-checks when prompted to evaluate the veracity of the post.

In response to the hoax photo, some X users replied with links to real footage from the protests that showed protesters hammering at concrete bollards, mixing false and true and reducing clarity around what was happening in reality. The independent journalist who posted the footage claimed the protesters were using the material as projectiles against police, though the footage did not show such actions.

The Social Media Lab, a research unit out of Toronto Metropolitan University, posted on Bluesky: “These days, it feels like every time there’s a protest, the old clickbaity ‘pallets of bricks’ hoax shows up right on cue. You know the one, photos or videos of bricks supposedly left out to encourage rioting. It’s catnip for right-wing agitators and grifters.”

Trump and the White House muddy the waters

Trump himself has fed the narrative that the protests are inauthentic and larger than they really are, fueled by outside agitators without legitimate interest in local matters.

“These are not protesters, they are troublemakers and insurrectionists,” Trump posted to Truth Social, which was screenshotted and reposted to X by Elon Musk. Others in the administration have made similar points on social media.

A reporter for the Los Angeles Times pointed out that the White House put out a statement about a particular Mexican national being arrested for allegedly assaulting an officer “during the riots”. In fact, Customs and Border Protection agents stopped him before the protests began.

Sowing misleading information, reaping distrust

Trump has increased the number of Ice raids across the country, which has stoked fears of deportations across Los Angeles, heavily populated with immigrants to the US. Per the Social Media Lab, anti-Ice posts also spread misinformation. One post on Bluesky, marked “Breaking”, claimed that federal agents had just arrived at an LA elementary school and tried to question first graders. In fact, the event occurred two months ago. Researchers called the post “rage-farming to push merch”.

The conspiratorial website InfoWars put out a broadcast on X titled: Watch Live: LA ICE Riots Spread To Major Cities Nationwide As Democrat Summer Of Rage Arrives, which attracted more than 40,000 simultaneous listeners when viewed by the Guardian on Tuesday morning. Though protests against deportations have occurred in other cities, the same level of chaos as seen in Los Angeles has not. A broadcast on X by the news outlet Reuters, Los Angeles after fourth night of immigration protests, had drawn just 13,000 viewers at the same time.

The proliferation of misinformation degrades X’s utility as a news source, though Musk continually tweets that it is the top news app in this country or that, most recently Qatar, a minor distinction. Old photos and videos mix with new and sow doubt in legitimate reporting. Since purchasing Twitter and renaming it X in late 2022, Musk has dismantled many of the company’s own initiatives for combatting the proliferation of lies, though he has promoted the user-generated fact-checking feature, “community notes”. During the 2024 US presidential election in particular, the X CEO himself became a hub for the spread of false information, say researchers. In his dozens of posts per day, he posted and reposted incorrect or misleading claims that reached about 2bn views, according to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Case 3:25-cv-04870 Document 1 Filed 06/09/25

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INTRODUCTION

1. The Governor of the State of California and the State of California bring this action to

protect the State against the illegal actions of the President, Secretary of Defense, and Department
of Defense to deploy members of the California National Guard, without lawful authority, and in violation of the Constitution.
2. One of the cornerstones of our Nation and our democracy is that our people are

governed by civil, not military, rule. The Founders enshrined these principles in our

Constitution-

that a government should be accountable to its people, guided by the rule of law,

and one of civil authority, not military rule.

3. President Trump has repeatedly invoked emergency powers to exceed the bounds of lawful executive authority. On Saturday, June 7, he used a protest that local authorities had under control to make another unprecedented power grab, this time at the cost of the sovereignty of the State of California and in disregard of the authority and role of the Governor as commander-in- chief of the State’s National Guard.
4. The vehicle the President has sought to invoke for this unprecedented usurpation of state authority and resources is a statute, 10 U.S.C. § 12406, that has been invoked on its own only once before and for highly unusual circumstances not presented here. Invoking this statute, the President issued a Memorandum on June 7, 2025 (Trump Memo), “call[ing] into Federal service members and units of the National Guard.” Secretary of Defense Hegseth, in turn, issued a Memorandum (DOD Order) that same day to the Adjutant General of California, ordering 2,000 California National Guard members into federal service. And on June 9, 2025, Secretary Hegseth 22 issued another Memorandum (June 9 DOD Order) ordering an additional 2,000 California

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National Guard members into federal service.

5. These orders were issued despite the text of section 12406, which, among other things, requires that when the President calls members of a State National Guard into federal
service pursuant to that statute, those orders “shall be issued through the governors of the States.” 10 U.S.C. § 12406. Instead, Secretary Hegseth unlawfully bypassed the Governor of California, issuing an order that by statute must go through him.

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COMPLAINT FOR DECLARATORY AND INJUNCTIVE RELIEF

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The UK has ended years of uncertainty over the future of its nuclear industry by pledging £11.5bn of new state funding for the Sizewell C project in Suffolk, taking the total taxpayer investment in the site to £17.8bn. 

Chancellor Rachel Reeves will announce the record public investment in nuclear energy on Tuesday, telling attendees at the GMB Congress that she is ending “years of delay” over Sizewell, which will support the creation of 10,000 jobs. 

Although Reeves has had to make tough decisions in the government’s spending review on day-to-day departmental budgets, she was able to find the extra billions for Sizewell C through a change to her fiscal rules. This has made £113bn available for extra capital spending across government, funded by borrowing.

The move marks a return to significant state funding for nuclear energy after the UK chose the private sector to finance and build its last project, Hinkley Point C in Somerset, which is heavily delayed and over budget. The previous record public investment in nuclear energy was £2bn for the Sizewell B plant in 1987, or £7bn in today’s prices. 

The UK government already has a partnership with French state-owned energy group EDF, which has kept a 15 per cent stake in Sizewell C. The pair are now seeking financial commitments from several other investors before they can sign off a “final investment decision”, expected next month during an Anglo-French summit in London. 

The chancellor will promise £14.2bn of taxpayer funding for the 3.2 gigawatt plant over the current parliament, including a £2.7bn commitment she previously made in the autumn Budget. The Treasury had already committed £3.6bn over the past two years.

EDF has said the final investment decision will depend on securing private investment and on whether it can make its expected return on capital, but Simone Rossi, the company’s UK chief executive, said the project would benefit the UK’s “energy security and economic growth”. 

Private investors expected to bid for stakes in Sizewell C include Canadian pension fund CDPQ, Amber Infrastructure Partners, Brookfield Asset Management, pension fund USS, Schroders Greencoat, Equitix, Centrica and insurer Rothesay. The total cost of the project could be close to £40bn by the time it is built, industry figures believe.

Ministers are encouraging the development of new nuclear power stations in the UK to provide future supplies of “baseload” electricity to balance the more intermittent supply of solar and wind power. 

But no new nuclear plant has opened in the UK since 1995 and most of the existing ageing fleet — apart from Sizewell B — is set to be phased out by the early 2030s. 

State-owned Great British Nuclear will soon announce the outcome of its competition to choose a company to start building a fleet of “small modular reactors”.  

The government said it would also invest more than £2.5bn in nuclear fusion over five years in what it called a “record investment” in the nascent technology. Melanie Windridge, head of advisory group Fusion Energy Insights, praised the government for recognising the “economic value of developing fusion in this country”. The sum is slightly less than the US is spending on fusion and one-third of China’s annual investment on the technology.

Additional reporting by Tom Wilson