How to spot the social media misinformation coming out of Israel, Gaza
The violence in the area has resulted in scores of false claims.
In the wake of Hamas’s deadly attacks in Israel over the weekend, and the retaliatory strikes against Gaza, misinformation is teeming across social media and some mainstream news outlets.
Many of the issues stem from the degradation of X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, following Elon Musk’s acquisition of it last year. While the platform previously had a system to verify actual journalists, Musk scrapped it in favor of allowing anyone to purchase a verification check. Because of this decision, actual journalists on the ground in the Middle East aren’t being surfaced in searches on the network and aren’t easily identifiable as trustworthy, while influencers and bad actors are seeing their erroneous posts showing up for more users.
“The level of disinformation on israel-hamas war being algorithmically promoted on twitter is unlike anything i’ve ever been exposed to in my career as a political scientist,” posted author and professor Ian Bremmer.
On Tuesday evening, NBC News reported that the community fact-checking system put in place on X had serious delays when it came to news surrounding the conflict, including false claims about emergency American aid being granted to Israel and a church being destroyed in Gaza. That report came shortly after the European Union sent a letter warning Musk that his network was potentially violating the EU’s Digital Services Act.
“Following the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas against Israel, we have indications that your platform is being used to disseminate illegal content and disinformation in the EU,” EU Commissioner Thierry Breton wrote, noting the spread of “fake and manipulated images and facts circulating on your platform in the EU, such as repurposed old images of unrelated armed conflicts or military footage that actually originated from video games.”
While X has been a leading spreader of misinformation, it’s not alone as honest mistakes and purposeful propaganda proliferate following cuts to trust and safety teams across the tech sector in recent months.
Examples from the past week
There have been numerous examples of blatant misinformation being spread almost immediately after the initial Hamas attacks on Saturday.
As mentioned in the EU letter to Musk, users were pushing clips of the hyperrealistic video game Arma 3 over the weekend, claiming they were scenes from the actual fighting.
On X, videos were posted claiming to show recent Israeli strikes on Hamas (actually footage from Syria in 2019), a woman allegedly being burned alive by a mob at an Israeli music festival (a video from Guatemala in 2015 that has been repurposed erroneously before) and celebrations of Israel’s strikes on Gaza (footage of a fireworks display for a soccer team earlier this year).
On Instagram, a video circulated claiming that footage of members of the Iranian Parliament chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” was tied to the recent violence, when the footage was instead from 2020.
A video was posted with a caption claiming it shows a young Jewish girl who had been taken hostage by Hamas. That clip was originally uploaded a month ago, and there’s no evidence the man in the video was a militant or that the girl was kidnapped.
As with any fast-developing breaking news story, the past few days have also seen the rapid circulation of information that, while potentially true, has not yet been verified by legitimate sources. For example, a viral story about Hamas beheading 40 Jewish infants was reported in numerous publications on Tuesday, although Israel Defense Forces officials said they did not have confirmation as of Wednesday morning and a New York Times report from the town where the alleged atrocity occurred does not mention that detail. There was also confusion over a German woman attending the music festival that was attacked who was initially reported dead but whose mother has since said she believes she is alive in a Gaza hospital.
The Los Angeles Times issued a correction to a column from conservative Jonah Goldberg, noting that “an earlier version of this column mentioned rape in the attacks, but such reports have not been substantiated.” The Wall Street Journal reported that Iran had helped plot the Hamas attack, but to this point the United States has said that while Iran has long supported the organization, there’s no concrete evidence at this time of Iran’s direct involvement in the latest attacks. Iran, meanwhile, has dismissed the claim.
In a televised address Wednesday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that men and women were were burned alive, young women were raped and soldiers were beheaded, while a Netanyahu spokesperson said earlier Wednesday that babies and toddlers were found decapitated, according to CNN, after the IDF had previously said it wouldn't be seeking further evidence of the claims. In response, Hamas spokesman and senior official Izzat al-Risheq claimed in a statement Wednesday that reports of “members of the Palestinian resistance behead[ing] children and attack[ing] women” were “lies” with “no evidence to support” them.
Earlier Wednesday, rumors swirled that the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, was being evacuated, becoming so prevalent that the State Department issued a notice saying that wasn’t true.
How to avoid misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war
Gordon Pennycook, a professor of psychology at Cornell who studies misinformation, said it’s important for users to “just verify that you know something is accurate before sharing it.”
One way to do that is to check the credentials of who you’re reading or listening to, as suggested by the Poynter Institute’s Alex Mahadevan.
“There are a lot of self-proclaimed experts in Middle Eastern geopolitics on social media right now,” writes Mahadevan. “To sift through the noise, search for their name, the organization with which they’re affiliated, the university on their LinkedIn page and their username and scan results to gauge their expertise.”
If you’re seeing a photo attached to a story that’s not from an outlet or reporter you know, you can double-check its accuracy to determine if something is new and legitimate or if it has been repurposed from a previous news event. To do that, you can run the image through a service like Google reverse image search or TinEye.
CNN reported that Israeli parents were urged to delete social media apps from their children’s phones to avoid the chance of seeing disturbing videos of hostages being taken. If you want to keep your social media apps but avoid being potentially exposed to violent imagery, you can change the settings on the apps so that videos no longer play automatically. The Washington Post has detailed instructions on how to do this for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X and WhatsApp.
