Soon after tensions escalated between Israel and Hamas, various social media platforms spewed and flourished with misinformation and sensitive content about situation. Out of all platforms, Elon Musk’s X- formerly Twitter- had the worst outbreak of false information pertaining to the war.
A European watchdog has given a strict warning against disinformation on X, and has demanded Musk’s answer in the next 24 hours. Inability to abide by the notice issued by the European watchdog could result in fines worth 6 per cent of the company’s yearly revenue.
In a letter addressed to X owner Elon Musk, Thierry Breton, the commissioner for the internal market in Europe said on Tuesday that his office has gathered that groups are spreading false information and “violent” content on X and demanded the tech billionaire to respond within twenty four hours.
Ian Miles Cheong, a far-right commentator whom Musk interacts with often, posted a video that he asserted showed Palestinian fighters killing Israeli citizens captioned, “Imagine if this was happening in our neighbourhood, to your family.”
But the video has still not been removed and has received millions of impressions. Also, many hundreds of other X accounts have shared the clip on the platform, some of them with verified check marks, a media group’s search claimed.
Disinformation – fake news that is spread intentionally – about the war and the Israel-Palestine conflict in general widening across other social networks like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok too, but thanks to Musk’s revamped policies that let anyone pay to be verified along with massive layoffs in X’s Trust and Safety teams, the microblogging site seems to have seen the worst of it.
On Monday, X notified that there were over 50 million posts on the platform over the weekend about the conflict.
In retaliation, the platform reported that it had suspended newly-created accounts associated with Hamas, escalated “tens of thousands of posts” for sharing graphic media and hate speech, and updated its policies that define what according to the platform is “newsworthy”.
Irina Raicu, the director of the Internet Ethics Program at Santa Clara University said, “These massive companies are still stumped by the proliferation of disinformation, even as no one is still surprised by it.”
“They put out numbers – how many posts they’ve taken down, how many accounts they’ve blocked, what settings you might want to change if you don’t want to see carnage. What they don’t put out are their metrics of their failures: how many distortions were not accompanied by ‘Community Notes’ or otherwise labelled, and for how long. It’s left to the journalists and researchers to document their failures after they happen.”
Over the last few years, people have extensively used social media platforms to spread false information in retaliation to real-world issues.
For instance, over the weekend, on X, a user called The Indian Muslim shared a video captioned “More power to you #Hamas” and professed that the clip had a Hamas armed fighter firing a large, shoulder-mounted rocket cannon at an Israeli helicopter.
Several disinformation researchers, both on social media and in interviews with Al Jazeera, confirmed that the footage was from a video game called Arma 3. The post has still not been erased and has over half a million views.
A Middle East research correspondent at the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, Dina Sadek, told a media group that a new false narrative her team had seen spawning on social media was that Palestinian group Hamas had received assistance from inside Israel to execute the attack.
“There’s old and recycled footage circulating online that is overwhelming and makes it difficult for users to discern what is real and what is not,” Sadek said.
“Disinformation around the attack is also travelling between platforms”, Sadek added. “Some TikTok videos find their way to X, and some footage that appeared on Telegram first is then seen on X,” she said.
