X/Twitter Accused of Spreading Disinformation About Israel-Hamas War

September 2024 · 6 minute read

X, the Elon Musk-owned social platform previously known as Twitter, has failed to flag “dozens” of posts purporting to show developments of the Israel-Hamas conflict that are false, CNBC reported.

The social network has in fact flagged several posts as misleading or false, including a video “purportedly showing Israeli airstrikes against Hamas in Gaza,” according to CNBC. But while some of the posts that went viral had warning labels applied to them, according to CNBC’s review, “dozens of posts with the same video and caption were not flagged by X’s system.”

“The level of disinformation on Israel-Hamas war being algorithmically promoted on Twitter is unlike anything I’ve ever been exposed to in my career as a political scientist,” Ian Bremmer, president and founder of consulting firm Eurasia Group and its GZERO Media arm, posted on Monday.

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An email sent to X’s PR account resulted in an autoreply that said, “Busy now, please check back later.”

Meanwhile, Musk on Sunday had written (in a since-deleted post), “For following the war in real-time, @WarMonitors and @sentdefender are good.” Commenters including CNN’s Jake Tapper called out the @WarMonitors account as having posted antisemitic material previously, including replying to someone on the platform “mind your own business, jew.”

“Elon Musk lauds this bigot as a good source of information, part Infiniti,” Tapper wrote regarding @WarMonitors. Musk subsequently removed his original post.

Separately on Sunday, Musk posted, “As always, please try stay as close to the truth as possible, even for stuff you don’t like. This platform aspires to maximize signal/noise of the human collective.” Later, he wrote, “Taking the path to hatred is to fail.”

Compounding the misinformation problem is X’s change last week to remove headlines from articles posted to the platform. That makes it possible for users to share links to legitimate news stories but with bogus headlines. Last month, X laid off about half the team responsible for combatting disinformation and maintaining “election integrity,” according to a report by the Information.

Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter, he and the company have faced accusations that the platform has failed to curb hate speech, and specifically antisemitic content. Last month, Musk accused the Anti-Defamation League of “trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic” and he had raised the prospect that X might sue the ADL for defamation.

In May, Musk wrote on Twitter, “Soros reminds me of Magneto,” comparing billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros to the Jewish supervillain from Marvel’s X-Men series. By way of explanation, Musk said Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” Musk’s comments about Soros drew a rebuke from ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who said, “Soros often is held up by the far-right, using antisemitic tropes, as the source of the world’s problems. To see @ElonMusk, regardless of his intent, feed this segment — comparing him to a Jewish supervillain, claiming Soros ‘hates humanity’ — is not just distressing, it’s dangerous: it will embolden extremists who already contrive anti-Jewish conspiracies and have tried to attack Soros and Jewish communities as a result.” (Two days later, Musk followed up with this: “I’d like apologize for this post. It was really unfair to Magneto.”)

Since then X CEO Linda Yaccarino and the company have vowed to address antisemitic speech on the platform, and the ADL issued an Oct. 4 statement saying it was encouraged by the statements while also noting that over the past several years, “X – along with other social media platforms – has a serious issue with antisemites and other extremists using these platforms to push their hateful ideas and, in some cases, bully Jewish and other users.”

“We appreciate X’s stated intent over the last few weeks to address antisemitism and hate on the platform,” the ADL’s statement said. “This has been useful; more needs to be done; and, as we have with other companies, in the spirit of collaboration, we are hopeful that we can continue to engage with X on this important matter. To be clear, any allegation that ADL has somehow orchestrated a boycott of X or caused billions of dollars of losses to the company or is ‘pulling the strings’ for other advertisers is false. Indeed, we ourselves were advertising on the platform until the anti-ADL attacks began a few weeks ago. We now are preparing to do so again to bring our important message on fighting hate to X and its users.”

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