Claims Antifa Embedded in Capitol Riots Come From a Deeply Unreliable Facial Recognition Company
XRVision also has a track record of spreading conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden
--
Congressman Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Florida, took to the House floor on Wednesday night to spread an increasingly popular conspiracy theory that the pro-Trump mobs that overtook the Capitol building were in fact aligned with antifa.
The claim was based on an anonymous source in a story from the Washington Times, a conservative outlet that has repeatedly pushed conspiracy theories. The source was described as a retired military official who told the newspaper that a facial recognition company called XRVision matched Capitol building rioters to previous images of antifa protesters collected in Philadelphia. (OneZero is not linking to the story to reduce the spread of misinformation.)
The day after OneZero published this story, XRVision provided a statement to BuzzFeed News disavowing any connection to the Washington Times story. The company did, however, acknowledge that it privately circulated an image analysis.
“The image analysis that we performed were distributed to a handful of individuals for their private consumption and not for publication. XRVision takes pride in its technology’s precision and deems the Washington Times publication as outright false, misleading, and defamatory,” the company said in the statement to BuzzFeed News.
XRVision’s claims are implausible and nearly impossible to verify, as the company does not seem to have any relationship to the facial recognition industry or academia. Unlike many other companies operating in the space, it has not published research publicly, it has not seemed to appear at recent academic conferences, it does not appear to have public federal government contracts, and it does not list any information about clients or its technology online.
