Viral Photo Of Bone Saws At Jared Kushner’s Home Is Totally Fake

An image on social media platform X, previously known as Twitter, has gone viral, purporting to show bone saws on the walls of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s home. But the photo is fake. The original image doesn’t show the saws at all.

The altered image seems to have originated with a verified X user called “Lynda hates GOP thugs,” who first presented the image as real, claiming that the family has the bone saws in their home as “art.” But the user later took credit for adding the bone saws in the photo.

“I photoshopped it. It seems like something they would do,” the account explains in a follow-up tweet.

But that admission hasn’t stopped the image from being spread without context on social media platforms where people think it’s real. Part of the problem may be in the way that X has changed the “verification” system that grants people blue checkmarks. Previously, a blue checkmark meant that a user’s ID was verified. But after Elon Musk bought the site in October 2022 he got rid of the verification system, and the social media platform now allows anyone to buy a checkmark for just $8 per month.

The original photo, which is seen below, was first shared by Ivanka Trump to Twitter back in 2019 with the caption, “The Force is strong in my family,” a reference to Star Wars.

Why bone saws? Presumably the photoshopped image is a reference to the fact that Jared Kushner received a $2 billion investment from a Saudi investment fund just six months after Kushner left the White House, where he worked as an advisor to former president Donald Trump. Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, commonly referred to as MBS, allegedly ordered the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Khashoggi’s body was dismembered with a bone saw in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, according to a U.S. intelligence report.

The incident radically altered the U.S.-Saudi relationship, two countries that were considered close diplomatically in their fight against common geopolitical enemies like Iran. The alleged murder of Khashoggi has caused the American public at large to question the relationship, but President Joe Biden made a trip to the Middle East in the summer of 2022 where his fist-bump was criticized for being too friendly with MBS.

X’s crowdsourced program for letting users know about fake images and misleading facts, known as Community Notes, typically informs people when a tweet is fake, but its one major flaw lies in how slow corrections can appear. At the time of this writing, Community Notes has not added a correction to the fake image, despite the fact that it’s been seen by over 150,000 people already.