The rapid spread of disinformation following a bloody attack by Hamas gunmen in Israel has put the spotlight on platform X (formerly known as Twitter), whose deluge of false or misleading content has raised concerns among experts, European officials and advertisers around the world.
Researchers claim that with the arrival of Elon Musk, policy changes in the approach to verification and security allowed disinformation to spread in a new way through the social network X and made this platform an unreliable resource in times of crisis, world media write.
The fog of war and the wave of unverified information
Following Hamas's surprise attack on Israel over the weekend and the escalation of violence, social media platforms and messaging apps have been flooded with viral rumors, misleading images and videos, and outright falsehoods, making it difficult for people in Israel, Gaza and around the world to seek and receive accurate information. and facts about the conflict, the American National Public Radio - NPR points out.
Platform X has emerged as a particular place where false claims and mischaracterized videos and photos are concentrated, as owner Elon Musk has removed many of the safeguards against the spread of false and misleading narratives.
One video released on Sunday, October 8, by a representative of a group calling itself Republicans Overseas Israel shows a man playing with a baby. The headline claims to show a "Hamas terrorist with a kidnapped Jewish girl in Gaza".
However, many users were quick to point out that the video was originally posted on TikTok in August and there was no indication that it depicted a kidnapped child and a terrorist. Although the post on Xu was marked with a user-generated fact-checker, it has been viewed a million times, NPR points out, and remains on the platform despite responses calling for its deletion or correction.
Experts warn that the fog of war and the accompanying wave of unverified information on the Internet, as reported by NPR, are fodder for state actors and other groups looking to use the chaos to foment division, spread propaganda, attack enemies and sow confusion.
The number of views is more important than accuracy
Intelligence researchers say the new conflict between militants in the Gaza Strip and Israel was an early test of how the revamped X transmits accurate data during a major crisis and that the immediate impression was poor, the Washington Post wrote.
The paper states that the owner of X, Elon Mask personally recommended users to follow accounts known for spreading lies for information about the war.
"For real-time war monitoring, @WarMonitors & @sentdefender are good," Musk posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter on Sunday morning to his 150 million profile followers. That post was viewed 11 million times in three hours, before Musk deleted it.
Musk left his responses on two accounts he promoted, each with more than 600.000 followers, increasing their visibility, the paper wrote, adding that Musk also continued to blame the "mainstream media," telling users to trust Xu instead.
Other accounts on Xu, the Washington Post points out, have attracted attention with photos or videos of unrelated attacks from earlier years and false claims that Iran or others entered the conflict.
An account impersonating the Jerusalem Post falsely announced that the Israeli prime minister had been taken to hospital, garnering more than 700.000 views. A number of accounts shared a fake document that claimed the White House had approved eight billion dollars in aid to Israel. Others posted video of buildings being demolished in Syria in the past and said they had been to Gaza.
Researchers say X has become much less trustworthy since Musk took control nearly a year ago and, among other things, stopped marking some accounts as government-related and began sending money to accounts that attract high engagement, rewarding views over accuracy.
The Washington paper also points to a recent study released by the European Commission that concluded that Russian propaganda about its war in Ukraine reached more people on X this year than last year.
Musk's unpopular changes
Part of the challenge for those fighting online disinformation is that changes made by Musk earlier this year made it harder to track all the deception on Platform X, according to Reuters.
Researchers who study the origins and spread of disinformation said they lost the ability to automatically track keywords, hashtags and other information about events in real time, since X eliminated access to the data processing tool that was free to academics before Musk bought it. platform in October last year.
Without that tool, researchers now have to manually analyze thousands of links, said Ruslan Trad, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Laboratory (DFRLab).
Under Mask, X allowed users to pay to verify their accounts and allows certain users to earn a portion of ad sales under a revenue-sharing program that, according to Stanford Internet Observatory research director Renee DiResta, is an incentive to spread provocative or false claims.
"It appears that some of these accounts (on Platform X) were recently set up to gain virality ... and spread popular misinformation about the war," said Jack Brewster, company editor at Newsguard, which rates the reliability of news websites.
While the disinformation appears to be most prevalent on Xu, Reuters also reports findings from researchers who indicate that false information has also spread on the messaging app Telegram and the TikTok app.
Concerns of regulators and advertisers
Misinformation surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has engulfed Elon Musk's Platform X has prompted new scrutiny of social media by European regulators and new concerns from global advertisers, the Financial Times points out.
In a letter to Musk on Tuesday, October 10, European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton wrote that the European Commission has "indications" that the platform is "being used to spread illegal content and disinformation" following Hamas attacks on Israel.
Citing the EU's Digital Services Act, Breton warned Musk that the company must have "proportionate and effective mitigation measures" to tackle misinformation.
Musk, a self-proclaimed "absolutist of free speech," has dramatically changed the platform, the paper points to the opinions of experts who claim that his decision to cut off resources for moderation has allowed misinformation to spread in new ways.
In a post on the Xa security account on Monday, the platform said it had seen an increase in daily active users in conflict areas and 50 million posts related to the Hamas attack.
They said they had taken action on "tens of thousands of posts" sharing images and videos, hate speech and violent behaviour. Several hundred accounts were said to have been removed for attempting to manipulate popular topics and newly created profiles linked to Hamas were being removed.
Still, the conflict may further alienate advertisers from X, many of whom left the platform last year because of a lack of confidence that their ads wouldn't appear alongside toxic or negative content.
"Musk's unpredictable behavior and polarizing political views have meant it has been a platform to avoid for some time," said one advertising agency executive.
Due to the exodus of advertisers, revenues in the US have fallen by 60 percent, Musk said last month.
The danger of spreading hatred and disorder
Posts about the attack in Israel led to confusion, misinformation and conflict on the X platform, revealing how a change in ownership and politics transformed the social media into an unreliable resource, according to Bloomberg, according to researchers.
Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theorist who has studied viral falsehoods on social media, said the news of the attack on Israel was "the first real test of Elon Musk's version of Twitter, and it failed spectacularly."
While falsehoods about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have spread on many other social media platforms, researchers say the effect on Xu has stood out because false posts have become unavoidable.
"Now it's almost impossible to tell what's fact, what's rumor, what's a conspiracy theory, and what's trolling," Rothschild said. "Musk's changes didn't just make X useless in a time of crisis. They actively made it worse."
Company X suggested users change their settings to control what media they see and pointed to the option to use so-called Community Notes, as "a way for people on X to add context to posts."
Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer of the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, said X's reaction shows the platform is pushing the onus of solutions onto users.
Stressing that platforms have a responsibility to create a safe environment for their users, including mitigating the risk of their tools becoming a threat to the public, Ahmed also warns of additional violence occurring as a result of lies spread online.
"The real-world consequences of these lies are violence on the streets, innocents injured and potentially lost lives," he added, "because some of these images and videos are designed to provoke the most extreme reactions possible."
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