Social Media Thread of Social Media Drama

[benji]

One week into the war between Israel and Gaza, social media is inducing a fog of war surpassing previous clashes in the region — one that’s shaping how panicked citizens and a global public view the conflict.

But now, a volatile, months-long fight over Israel’s democratic future has primed conspiracies and false information to spread within its borders. Tech platforms, diminished from waves of layoffs, have receded from policing falsehoods, disinformation and hate speech online. Electricity outages and strikes on telecommunications infrastructure in Gaza threaten Palestinians’ connectivity, according to human rights organizations.

While social media has been a critical tool for disseminating wartime information in recent days, a barrage of images, memes and testimonials is making it difficult to assess what is real. Activists in the region warn that viral horror stories that turn out not to be true may lead people to further distrust authority figures — and could spark hate, violence and retaliation against innocent people.

“I’m terrified,” Marwa Fatafta, a policy analyst at Al Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank and regional policy manager for the nonprofit digital human rights group Access Now. “There’s a lot of information being shared that is not verified, a lot of calls to violence and dehumanization. And all this is fanning the flames for further massacres [of Palestinians].”

Foreign disinformation — a key element of Russia’s global strategy — has been a major feature of the protracted war in Ukraine.

But in the current Middle East war, researchers have so far found only minimal evidence of disinformation originating abroad, said John Hultquist, chief analyst with the Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant.

Instead, much misinformation about the war is directed inward.

And unlike in 2021, Palestinians in Gaza are already losing access to the internet, she said, compromising their ability to tell their story to the world.

“People don’t have enough electricity to charge up their devices,” she said. “There are people who can’t send SMS messages, some telecommunications infrastructure has been damaged … It’s becoming an information blackout.”

Hamas’ swift and violent attack is more difficult to parse than the events in 2021. “No one knows what really happened on the border,” Schatz said. “It was too big, too fast and too brutal.”

This void is being filled by misinformation that appeals to people’s rage — which researchers warn could lead to more antisemitic attacks or violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel — and to justify a more brutal retaliation in Gaza.

Another WhatsApp voice memo featured the voice of a man claiming to be a soldier with intelligence that the country’s Arab citizens — roughly 20 percent of Israel’s population — were planning a coordinated attack. The audio message, which was played for The Washington Post, said Palestinian citizens were going to show up in vehicles with Israeli plates and “start shooting people.”

WhatsApp, a Meta-owned messaging platform, is the default communication across the region and enables people to forward audio messages to many groups, each of which can include more than a thousand members. But the source of such messages, and the extent of their spread, is nearly impossible to trace.

Now even our wars aren't safe from disinformation.

A Palestinian digital rights organization called 7amleh says it has detected more than 19,000 cases of hate speech and violent incitement against Palestinians in the Hebrew language on X since Oct. 7, the first day of escalations. The organization’s executive director, Nadim Nashif, said he wasn’t able to flag the content to X because the organization’s former points of contact at the company had been fired by Elon Musk
...
But over the last year, tech companies’ abilities to field these complaints has been compromised by waves of layoffs in units responsible for policing problematic content. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has laid off many members of a global operations team that monitors the platform, including Arabic speakers, according to a person familiar with the layoffs who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them. Under the leadership of Musk, X has fired the teams that acted as point people on the ground for advocates in the region. On Wednesday the European Union announced a probe into X for failures to moderate potentially illegal content and disinformation on its service.

Schatz said there is little communication from Meta-owned WhatsApp because the messaging platform is viewed as a private, encrypted service. And at X, he echoed Nashif’s account that, over the last year, “there has been no one to talk to” due to the firings.
...
But Eric Feinberg, vice president for content moderation at the Coalition for a Safer Web, noted that Hamas and its supporters have been able to use X to share antisemitic propaganda across the Arab world relatively unchecked. He provided screenshots of pro-Hamas accounts using WhatsApp and X in English to rally support for the organization’s attacks on Israel in Pakistan.

They really want secret backchannels to powerful unnamed people within these companies to control everything said on the platforms don't they. (But not hate speech from the Palestinians losing access that we're also supposed to be upset about.)