X/Twitter Accused of Spreading Disinformation About Israel-Hamas Conflict
09.10.2023 - 17:41
/ variety.com
Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor 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.” 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
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