The Israel-Hamas War Is Drowning X in Disinformation
wired.com
People who have turned to X for breaking news about the Israel-Hamas conflict are being hit with old videos, fake photos, and video game footage at a level researchers have never seen.
People who have turned to X for breaking news about the Israel-Hamas conflict are being hit with old videos, fake photos, and video game footage at a level researchers have never seen.
Maybe it's not a good idea to use a media platform run by a megalomaniac moron as a primary source of news and information.
The one with a rocket program. Oh wait...
The one who's a billionaire. Oh wait...
The one who, oh wait...
no no I got this, the white guy!
No, he must be a Jew
It's a great timeline .... 99% of the planet relies on megalomaniac morons, mega corporations, billionaires and for profit media corporations for all their information.
And we wonder why there is so much misinformation, disinformation, non information and covered up information everywhere.
It's definitely the information age .... expect no one said it would actually keep us informed or have any benefit to humanity.
Same as it ever was
A 100 years ago you got your morning paper that can give you a set of tainted views, because you had no chance to independently check, what is going on on the other side of the world. Now you got Fox news and others shoving down the propaganda narrative with a different set of "experts" 24/7.
And newspapers used to be full of lies on purpose to sell more copies.
I thought this was gonna be Dewey beats Truman or something but this is for more interesting.
Oh no, it's DEFINITELY the informarion age. The truth is out there.
There's just no money to be made with hard work and actual journalism.
Fair, but this article is talking about primary information from people who are actually there and small local news outlets being drowned out by misinformation. A lot of primary information in 2023 comes from social media which is then investigated and fact checked by larger and more reputable news outlets before being reported.
So yes, the average person who just wants to know what's happening should not be getting that info from social media but reporters often have to. Changes to Twitter since musk took over (specifically paid blue check marks and the removal of titles from links) have made the process of sifting through the misinformation and disinformation exponentially harder, even for people who do it for a living like the researcher in the article.
It's not just TwitX, there's a bunch on Lemmy and Reddit feeds too
At this point Hexbear is essentially co-opted by astroturfing terrorists
Can't co-opt something when the same people founded it.
You think terrorists started hexbear?
The 12 year old loser 4channers that thought (probably still think) saying the 'n' word is hilarious, turned into 25 year old fascists that think "nihilism" means "make life shitty for everyone else."
Who are you talking about right now? Hexbear? Is your basis for who is a fascist just that they are rude to liberals on the internet and have intense feelings about capitalism and imperialism?
What the fuck does this even mean?
Their disgustingly aggressive support of terrorism is because they are idiots who fall for propaganda
Or because they are aware of the conditions of life imposed in Palestine?
That 50% of the children in Gaza express no will to live? That 95% of the water is contaminated and Israel strictly controls the water supply? That thousands of civilians have been killed by the Israeli army since 2008? That Gaza functions as an open air concentration camp administrated by an openly racist apartheid state? That Israel helped fund and create Hamas in the 70s and 80s as a counterweight to the largely secular leftist PLO and this whole fucking situation is partially blowback from an effort to divide-and-conquer Palestine? That Hamas fucking chased the PLO out of Gaza, and now Hamas is essentially the only militant force left that can resist the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians?
Who else is there for Palestinians to root for? What the fuck are they supposed to do? Just sit in their squalid concentration camp and raise their depressed children to be unemployed adults with no future, in a crumbling city with no concrete to rebuild itself, because a rich nation on the other side of the fence deemed it so?
And in an overseas media environment where no one even fucking talks about any of this shit, and the attack is being treated as this sudden unprovoked thing out of left field, maybe some people are going to overcorrect in the other direction out of sheer frustration?
I'm well aware of conditions of life in Palestine. Perhaps if Hamas allowed elections in the last 20 years, there would be radically different relationships there.
The elections that determine those conditions are Israeli elections. Israel prevents Palestinians from voting in those.
That is just completely false. Since seizing power, Hamas has not allowed further elections.
I welcome your citation proving otherwise, but ultimately it's irrelevant because every member of Hamas will ideally be dead soon.
I am pointing out that people in Gaza are not Israeli citizens, and the conditions in Gaza are imposed by Israel
I agree that Gaza should be made part of Israel permanently.
the Israeli government disagrees and regards Palestinians as a "demographic threat."
Co-opted??? Moron, get your anti-left propaganda right lol.
Words have actual meanings
The greatest moron in the world.
as long as he's #1 in your thoughts, he can sleep.. a kind of sleep anyway..
If you're getting your information from facebook, twitter or fox news (to name a few top offenders) you're in for a bad time.
And if a significant enough portion of the people are getting their information from those sources, we're all in for a bad time.
More like: we're all in for a bad time.
Unfortunately, their inability to discern fantasy from reality does not only affect them.
Sometimes, the fantasy is presented in a credible manner. That's the hook.
I think another big issue is that there are a lot of news outlets that get their info from those three sources.
That's not a fair assessment. A lot of news outlets get their info from social media like Twitter so, even if you're not getting it directly from there, it's very likely that you're still getting information from there.
Hard enough to get unbiased reporting at the best of times.
Every media outlet picked sides on this a long time ago.
X is a far-right nazi sympathizing website. Advertisers should have pulled their products a year ago
Maybe they shouldn't
One of the few benefits that Twitter used to have was how useful it was for breaking news and events.
Yeah, it was very useful at getting hot takes, misinformation, sensationalist and outsourced soundbites. It still useful for that, but now there is more unchecked nazism.
Good thing you figured out how to get your hot takes elsewhere.
Or, here me out for a second, I figured that I shouldn't rely on hot takes to get my information.
At this point the Onion has more accurate news than X
They have always had more accurate news than the mainstream media, they just have a roundabout way of giving it.
In fairness… People who turn to twitter for news aren’t the type of people that generally like to be informed by reality.
It certainly became worse, but it's not like it was good before him.
Stay away from that echo chamber
Stay away from that echo chamber
Stay away from that echo chamber
Stay away from that echo chamber
Stay away
Stay away way ~way~ ~wa~
Chamber ... Chamber ... ^Chamber
Honestly I blame the news orgs for this.
There are a ton of videos floating around that ARE credible. They simply aren't getting reported on in a meaningful way. If they do get mentioned, it's often in an extremely watered down manner that almost feels intentionally misleading.
You also have videos that are 100 percent verifiable (or the protest videos) that are only being reported on by a few organizations, often leaving out important context.
If the mainstream media refuses to truly engage in the situation, then people will turn to dubious sources.
I mean, that's just the other side of the same coin. They need good info to dig through, and they need to actually dig. Both are required for actual journalism, and both don't work under capitalism. There's too much money in lies, and it's expensive to fight them in the first place.
I disagree with the headline, the war is not causing disinformation. Its bad faith users posting disinformation and ~~X's ~~ (nope still calling it Twitter) policies that not only let it happen but encourage it.
I go with Xitter, or "porn site X.com."
If you went to Twitter pre-Musk for your news you're still a moron.
It was the social media of choice for journalists. It was an excellent place to get your news as long as you followed the right people (reputable, credible professionals).
Now many of those right people have left and they're far more difficult to distinguish from the wrong people.
Agreed. I didn't use Twitter, but friends followed NPR correspondents for information and, while it didn't replace the news, it enhanced it for them.
It actually had some credibility before. It wasn't perfect by any means, but it did have some credibility. Not so much now.
Imagine clicking on a video thinking it’s footage of current events and it’s from a game.
Imagine not being at all media-savvy and buying into it. MAGA types are idiot shitheads who are completely driven by their emotions. There’s no higher function.
Oh no, please tell me this isn't true. Surely the well balanced and entirely rational Mr. Musk wouldn't let this happen?
Who are these articles for because everyone I know has always had the opinion that Twitter is full of dumb takes and misinfo
Millions and millions of people who are still using it as their primary info source.
Good that you apparently don't know any of them, but the number of people who actually stopped using TwitX or use it less appears to be shockingly small.
Yeah unfortunately my friends use tiktok as their primary source so I can't give them to much credit.
That seems...significantly worse.
Haha yep. I've heard them describe events and I have to stop them and say "do you really think it happened like that?" Then pull up Wikipedia and go through the events filling in the important context that their tiktok conveniently left out.
But everytime I do this i think they trust tiktok less.
I wonder how long people are going to keep calling it X
Twitter or shitter don't help this baby claim a precious letter
The site has tons of it.
Oh no! Poor X. crying emoji
Reposting my question from the other post:
Can lemmy become the place on the internet to discover the best accounts on X and thus become popular?
It should be the place to discover the best accounts on Mastodon.