This image itself appears to be slop? Besides the litany of smaller visual errors, the ham-fisted, smugly didactic labelling of concepts is a huge, widespread tell that I have to assume is totally lost on, if not actively favoured by, the kinds of people who make these braindead AI cartoons.

Which leaves me very confused about the viewpoint of whoever created this.

Sure, but the gif doesn’t show 50 knots. The gif doesn’t show any speed actually, so I really don’t know where the 50 number comes from. But on the tracker the speed was 8.1 knots. Fast for a tanker, but totally believable.

The gif shows no data (dimmed icon) from 08:49 UTC to 11:10 UTC so I had my maths wrong and it’s 2 hours 21 minutes, apologies. Still a lot more than 30 minutes. The AIS data also generally comes in less frequently than every minute so there’s some unreliability there.

As I said, according to the current data the ship definitely kept going back up towards the Strait since I posted, so what’s more likely, it kept going on its current course and spoofed its AIS for nearly 12 hours, or that it turned around?

My source is marinetraffic.com. Other AIS trackers also corroborate it.

From the sounds of it the OP and most other articles are based on similar armchair research looking at trackers so I think it’s about as reliable as we’re going to get.

I don’t know where you’re getting any of that from. It was travelling at 8 knots before and after the turnaround. The bit in the animation where it slows and drifts almost due south is actually marinetraffic not having AIS data for that period so it just interpolates between the two known positions. Maybe I should have made that clearer.

That turnaround period is also close to 3.5 hours, not 30 minutes.

According to the same data the ship is now close to the Strait of Hormuz that it passed through yesterday; it seems pretty clear it did not get where it wanted to go.

Everyone is reporting on these ships making it through the strait which is still under Iranian control. Few seem to mention the part in the Gulf of Oman where the US is actually implementing its blockade. The poster child, Rich Starry, mentioned in the article, did this a few hours after clearing the strait, still far from the Arabian Sea:

That sure doesn’t look like a ship breaching a blockade without incident.

It’s too early to say how this will play out on a larger scale but for these specific ships a lot of reporting is really fucking misleading at the moment.