Fake news stories wrongly blame transgender pilot for causing the DC plane crash

This is a screengrab of a post on X making false claims that a transgender helicopter pilot caused the fatal collision between a military helicopter and a commercial airliner on January 29 in Washington.

After 67 people died in a collision between a military helicopter and a commercial airliner on January 29 in Washington, DC, far-right social media accounts began wrongly accusing Jo Ellis, a transgender American helicopter pilot, for causing the crash. Ellis took to Facebook to deny the rumours. This comes amid a wider campaign by the Trump administration targeting transgender servicemen and women in the US Army.

"Some craziness has happened on the internet and I’m being named as one of the pilots of the DC crash,” Jo Ellis wrote in a Facebook post on January 31. "It’s insulting to the victims and the families of those lost.”

Ellis was forced to respond after a large number of social media users on X and Facebook claimed that she was behind the collision between a US military helicopter and a commercial airline in Washington DC on January 29, which led to the deaths of 67 people.

A transphobic fake news story pushed by pro-Trump accounts

"Jo has been making radicalized anti-Trump statements on socials,” Fraxis added in a post featuring images of Ellis. The post has since been deleted.

ADVERTISEMENT

Other accounts went even further claiming not only that Ellis was responsible but that “speculations” were rising about the pilot’s potentially “deliberate intentions”.


Read more on The Observers - France 24