How Big Tech is fueling — and monetizing — false narratives about Israel and Palestine
THE FOG OF DIGITAL DISINFORMATION
I have few words for the atrocities carried out by Hamas in Israel since October 7, and the horrors that are now unfolding in Gaza.
I have a few more for a certain class of social media users at this moment. The violence in Israel and Palestine has triggered what feels like a never-ending stream of pseudo-reporting on the conflict: allegations, rumors and straight up falsehoods about what is happening are emerging at breakneck speed. I’m not talking about posts from people who are actually on the ground and may be saying or reporting things that are not verified. That’s the real fog of war. Instead, I’m talking about posts from people who jump into the fray not because they have something urgent to report or say, but just because they can.
Social media has given many of us the illusion of total access to a conflict situation, a play-by-play in real time. In the past, this was enlightening — or at least it felt that way. During the Gaza War in 2014, firsthand civilian accounts were something you could readily find on what was then called Twitter, if you knew where to look. I remember reading one journalist’s tweets about her desperate attempt to flee Gaza at the Rafah border crossing, amid heavy shelling by Israeli forces — her story stuck with me for years, returning to my mind whenever Gaza came up. These kinds of narratives may still be out there, but they are almost impossible to find amidst the clutter. And this time around, those stories from Gaza could disappear from the web altogether, now that Israel has cut off electricity in the territory, and internet access there is in free fall.
This illusion of being close to a conflict, of being able to understand its contours from far away is no longer a product of carefully reported news and firsthand accounts on social media. Sure, there was garbage out there in 2014, but nearly a decade on, it feels as if there are just as many posts about war crimes that never happened as there are about actual atrocities that did. Our current internet, not to mention the state of artificial intelligence, makes it too easy to spread misinformation and lies.