An apparent Twitter joke got out of control this weekend, falsely convincing some users — and possibly even the leader of the QAnon conspiracy theory — that MSNBC ran a broadcast with World War Z shots instead of real protest footage.
Over the past day, an image and video clip have spread around Twitter comparing a news broadcast with a scene from the Brad Pitt film World War Z. The clip seems to show MSNBC reporting on the weekend’s nationwide protests, narrating over an aerial view of Philadelphia dotted with fires and smoke plumes. If you look up World War Z’s trailer, you can see the same shot midway through the video, suggesting the news outlet either badly screwed up its reporting or deliberately falsified the story. But if you…