{"id":1092,"date":"2023-10-19T09:41:06","date_gmt":"2023-10-19T09:41:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/raqeeb.ps\/en\/?p=1092"},"modified":"2023-10-19T09:41:06","modified_gmt":"2023-10-19T09:41:06","slug":"social-media-platforms-swamped-with-fake-news-on-the-israel-hamas-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/raqeeb.ps\/en\/1092.html","title":{"rendered":"Social media platforms swamped with fake news on the Israel-Hamas war"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"article-header\">\n<h1>Social media platforms swamped with fake news on the Israel-Hamas war<\/h1>\n<p class=\"article__subhead css-1wt8oh6\"><em>Of all platforms, Elon Musk\u2019s X appears to have had the worst outbreak of fake news related to the war.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<figure class=\"article-featured-image\">\n<div class=\"responsive-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/AP23280400744514-1696974941.jpg?resize=770%2C513&amp;quality=80\" sizes=\"(max-width: 120px) 120px, (max-width: 270px) 270px, (max-width: 375px) 375px, (max-width: 570px) 570px, (max-width: 770px) 770px, 770px\" srcset=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/AP23280400744514-1696974941.jpg?resize=120%2C80&amp;quality=80 120w, \/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/AP23280400744514-1696974941.jpg?resize=270%2C180&amp;quality=80 270w, \/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/AP23280400744514-1696974941.jpg?resize=375%2C250&amp;quality=80 375w, \/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/AP23280400744514-1696974941.jpg?resize=570%2C380&amp;quality=80 570w, \/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/AP23280400744514-1696974941.jpg?resize=770%2C513&amp;quality=80 770w\" alt=\"Palestinians wave their national flag and celebrate by a destroyed Israeli tank at the Gaza Strip fence east of Khan Younis southern Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. The militant Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip carried out an unprecedented, multi-front attack on Israel at daybreak Saturday, firing thousands of rockets as dozens of Hamas fighters infiltrated the heavily fortified border in several locations by air, land, and sea and catching the country off-guard on a major holiday. (AP Photo\/Yousef Masoud)\" \/><\/div><figcaption>Disinformation &#8211; fake news that is spread deliberately &#8211; about the Israel-Palestine conflict has spread across all social networks like X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok [Yousef Masoud\/AP]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<div class=\"article-info-block css-ti04u9\">\n<div class=\"article-b-l\">\n<div class=\"article-author-name\"><span class=\"article-by\">By\u00a0<\/span><span class=\"article-author-name-item\"><a class=\"author-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/author\/dixitp\">Pranav Dixit<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"article-dates\">\n<div class=\"date-simple css-1yjq2zp\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Published On 10 Oct 2023<\/span><span aria-hidden=\"true\">10 Oct 2023<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"social-share-buttons\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"wysiwyg wysiwyg--all-content css-ibbk12\" aria-live=\"polite\" aria-atomic=\"true\">\n<p>Hours after\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/program\/newsfeed\/2023\/10\/10\/what-is-the-armed-palestinian-group-hamas-2\">Hamas<\/a>, the armed Palestinian group, attacked Israel on Saturday, X, the social network owned by the world\u2019s richest man Elon Musk was awash with fake videos, photos and misleading information about the conflict.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cImagine if this was happening in our neighbourhood, to your family,\u201d posted Ian Miles Cheong, a far-right commentator whom Musk interacts with often, along with a video that he claimed showed Palestinian fighters killing Israeli citizens.<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-on\"><\/div>\n<p>A Community Note, an X feature that lets users add context to posts, stated that the people in the clip were members of Israeli law enforcement, not Hamas.<\/p>\n<p>But the video is still up and has racked up millions of impressions. And hundreds of other X accounts have shared the clip on the platform, some of them with verified check marks, an Al Jazeera search showed.<\/p>\n<p>Disinformation \u2013 fake news that is spread deliberately \u2013 about the war and the Israel-Palestine conflict in general spread across other social networks like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok too, but thanks to Musk\u2019s revamped policies that let anyone pay to be verified as well as large scale layoffs in X\u2019s Trust and Safety teams, the platform appears to have seen the worst of it.<\/p>\n<p>X, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, TikTok, and BlueSky, did not respond to Al Jazeera\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n<p>On Monday, X declared there were more than 50 million posts on the platform over the weekend about the conflict.<\/p>\n<p>In response, the company said it had removed newly-created accounts affiliated with Hamas, escalated \u201ctens of thousands of posts\u201d for sharing graphic media and hate speech, and updated its policies that define what the platform considers \u201cnewsworthy\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThese massive companies are still stumped by the proliferation of disinformation, even as no one is still surprised by it,\u201d said Irina Raicu, the director of the Internet Ethics Program at Santa Clara University.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey put out numbers \u2013 how many posts they\u2019ve taken down, how many accounts they\u2019ve blocked, what settings you might want to change if you don\u2019t want to see carnage. What they don\u2019t put out are their metrics of their failures: how many distortions were not accompanied by \u2018Community Notes\u2019 or otherwise labelled, and for how long. It\u2019s left to the journalists and researchers to document their failures after they happen.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"old-and-recycled-footage\">\u2018Old and recycled footage\u2019<\/h2>\n<p>Over the last few years, bad actors have repeatedly used social media platforms to spread disinformation in response to real-world conflicts. In 2019, for instance, Twitter and Facebook were flooded with rumours and hoaxes after India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers, came to the brink of war following Pakistan\u2019s shooting down of two Indian warplanes and its capture of an Indian pilot.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"in-page-video\" role=\"presentation\">\n<div>\n<div>\n<div id=\"vjs_video_3\" class=\"video-js pause-controller vjs-paused vjs-controls-enabled vjs-workinghover vjs-v7 vjs-user-active vjs-layout-large bc-player-6tKQRAx7lu_default bc-player-6tKQRAx7lu_default-index-0 vjs-mouse vjs-ad-controls vjs-ima3-html5 vjs-dock vjs-plugins-ready vjs-player-info vjs-contextmenu vjs-contextmenu-ui vjs-errors vjs-quality-menu not-hover\" lang=\"en\" tabindex=\"-1\" role=\"region\" translate=\"no\" data-has-listener=\"true\" data-video-id=\"6338741382112\" aria-label=\"Video Player\" aria-labelledby=\"vjs_video_3 vjs-dock-title-1\" aria-describedby=\"vjs-dock-description-2\">\n<div class=\"vjs-text-track-display\" translate=\"yes\" aria-live=\"off\" aria-atomic=\"true\">\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"vjs-ima3-ad-container\">\n<div><iframe id=\"goog_1124273426\" src=\"https:\/\/imasdk.googleapis.com\/js\/core\/bridge3.595.0_en.html#goog_1124273426\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><button class=\"vjs-big-play-button\" title=\"Play Video\" type=\"button\" aria-disabled=\"false\"><span class=\"vjs-control-text\" aria-live=\"polite\">Play Video<\/span><\/button><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div><figcaption>How the spread of information shapes the narrative in Israel-Hamas war<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>This week, on X, a user called The Indian Muslim shared a video with the caption \u201cMore power to you #Hamas\u201d and claimed that the clip showed a Hamas armed fighter firing a large, shoulder-mounted rocket cannon and taking down an Israeli helicopter.<\/p>\n<p>Multiple disinformation researchers, both on social media and in interviews with Al Jazeera, pointed out that the footage was from a video game called Arma 3. The post, which has Community Notes on it, is still up and has more than half a million views.<\/p>\n<div class=\"container--ads in-article-ads\">\n<div class=\"ads\">\n<div class=\"ads__slot\">\n<div>\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-904734632589\" class=\"freestar-ads\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Another post by Jim Ferguson, a British social media influencer, claims to show Hamas soldiers using US weapons \u201cleft behind in Afghanistan used to attack Israel\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>But according to Community Notes, the photo shows Taliban soldiers from 2021, not Hamas. Fergusson\u2019s post, which is still available on the platform, has more than 10 million views.<\/p>\n<p>Dina Sadek, a Middle East research fellow at the Atlantic Council\u2019s DFRLab, told Al Jazeera that another false narrative her team had seen spreading on platforms was that Hamas had received help from inside Israel to plan the attack.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere\u2019s old and recycled footage circulating online that is overwhelming and makes it difficult for users to discern what is real and what is not,\u201d Sadek said.<\/p>\n<p>Disinformation around the attack is also travelling between platforms, Sadek added. \u201cSome TikTok videos find their way to X, and some footage that appeared on Telegram first is then seen on X,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<div class=\"container--ads in-article-ads\">\n<div class=\"ads\">\n<div class=\"ads__slot\">\n<div>\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-595301233120\" class=\"freestar-ads\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>\u201cThe flood of grifters spreading lies and hate about the Israel-Gaza crisis in recent days, combined with algorithms that aggressively promote extreme and disturbing content, is exactly why social media has become such a bad place to access reliable information,\u201d Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTech companies have proven themselves uninterested, if not utterly complicit, in the spread of dangerous propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-source\">SOURCE:\u00a0AL JAZEERA<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Social media platforms swamped with fake news on the Israel-Hamas war Of all platforms, Elon Musk\u2019s X appears to have had the worst outbreak of fake news related to the war. Disinformation &#8211; fake news that is spread deliberately &#8211; about the Israel-Palestine conflict has spread across all social networks like X, Facebook, Instagram and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1094,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1092","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fighting-palestinian-contents-on-social-media"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/raqeeb.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/raqeeb.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/raqeeb.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raqeeb.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raqeeb.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1092"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/raqeeb.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1095,"href":"https:\/\/raqeeb.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1092\/revisions\/1095"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raqeeb.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/raqeeb.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raqeeb.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raqeeb.ps\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}