September 11, 2026: If the Attack on the Twin Towers Happened Today

Imagining September 11, 2026, with a plane striking one of the Twin Towers at 8:46 in the morning, is not a historical reconstruction but an experiment on our present. After the impact, the first shaky, vertical video would appear online within seconds, followed by an explosion of searches on Google Trends. Within minutes, the first fake videos generated by artificial intelligence would begin circulating, including an extraordinarily realistic fake presidential statement.

The reality of the attack would immediately be submerged by dozens of different versions, fueled by viral hashtags like #ThirdTower (for a tower that doesn't exist), manipulated or outdated satellite images, and an avalanche of user-generated content. Authorities would launch appeals against the spread of unverified information, but the distinction between official statements and fakes would become almost imperceptible, creating the paradox of a hyper-documented event that is incredibly difficult to understand.

The experiment stems from a real historical event: the September 11, 2001 attacks, when two hijacked airliners struck the Twin Towers in New York. At that time, most people followed events primarily through television, with the internet playing a complementary role. The basic idea of the exercise is to compare that media environment with today's, dominated by smartphones, social networks, and artificial intelligence.

The path leading to this reflection is the vertiginous technological development of the last two decades. Today, any event is instantly captured by millions of personal cameras and shared on global platforms. Simultaneously, sophisticated tools for manipulating content have emerged: deepfakes, AI-generated videos, and altered satellite imagery. This has created an environment where an abundance of information does not guarantee clarity but can generate confusion and conflicting theories. The hypothesized consequence is that, despite an unprecedented volume of evidence, the battle for truth would shift from the scenes of the attack to the screens of our devices, testing our ability to distinguish the real from the fabricated.