Major social media platforms, once lauded for their ability to document global events in real time, face a crisis of authenticity, a crisis of their own making, critics say.
The war between Israel and Hamas has generated so much false or misleading information online (much of it intentional, though not all) that it has obscured what is really happening on the ground.
In turn, people are turning to sources that reflect their feelings, deepening social and political divisions. There are so many false claims that some people question the true ones. And it’s not just X, formerly known as Twitter, which has removed many of its security barriers in recent months. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (with programs that can produce virtually unlimited amounts of content) are already exacerbating that digital cacophony.
However, the authenticity crisis is broader than the social media that has come to dominate public discourse.
Trust in mainstream media has also eroded, with news organizations regularly accused of refracting state, corporate or political interests. That has helped fuel a profusion of alternative sites online. Many adhere to a particular point of view, shared by online users and driven by algorithms that reward shocking or emotional content over nuance or balance.
“We have distorted the information ecosystem,” said Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, an advocacy organization.
A survey conducted last year by the Pew Research Center showed that people under 30 trusted social media almost as much as traditional media. About half of them expressed little trust in either of them. (Among all age groups, trust in traditional news organizations remains higher, although it has steadily declined since 2016.)
“The connection I always try to make is between important forces that want to confuse and distract us, and the end result is always that people will be less engaged,” Ms. Benavidez said. “People will be less sure about the topics they care about, less aware of why something might matter, less connected to themselves and others.”
Not long ago, social media was heralded as a powerful tool for democratizing news and information.
In 2009, when mass demonstrations broke out in Iran over a rigged election, protesters used social media to break the information stranglehold of the country’s authoritarian rulers. They were able to publish texts, photographs and videos that challenged the government’s claims. Some called it a Twitter revolution.
Virtually every major event since then – from sporting events to natural disasters, terrorist attacks and wars – has unfolded online, documented viscerally, instantly, by the devices billions of people carry in their hands.
The ubiquity of social media in most of the world still serves that function in many cases, providing evidence e.g. document Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
However, as the conflict in Israel has shown, the same tools have increasingly contributed to confusing rather than enlightening.
In any war, discerning fact from fiction (or propaganda) can be extremely difficult. Antagonists seek to control access to information from the front. No one can have more than one straw of soda at any given time. Now, however, fake or misleading videos have gone viral faster than fact-checkers can debunk them or platforms can remove them in accordance with company policies.
Many times the problem lies in the details. Hamas killed dozens of Israelis, including children, in an attack on Kfar Aza, a kibbutz near Gaza. A French television correspondent’s unverified report that 40 babies were decapitated in the attack went viral on social media as if it were fact. The report remains unconfirmed. It was even leaked in a statement from President Biden that he had seen photographs of that particular horror, prompting the White House to backtrack a bit on its comments, saying the information came from news reports.
Hamas has skillfully exploited social media to promote its cause as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State once did. He used the largely unfiltered Telegram app as a conduit to push graphic and celebratory images of his raid from Gaza into wider circulation on social media sites that have banned terrorist organizations.
Increasingly, our digitized lives have become an information battlefield, with all parties in any conflict competing to offer their side. Old images have been recycled to create a new point. At the same time, real images have been published. disputed as falseincluding a bloody photo that Donald J. Trump Jr., the former president’s son, shared on X.
Trusted news organizations used to function as curators, verifying information and contextualizing it, and they still do. However, some have tried to question their reliability as gatekeepers, most notably Elon Musk, X’s owner.
The day after fighting broke out in Israel, Musk shared a post on X encouraging his followers to trust the platform more than mainstream media, recommending two accounts that have been known to spread false claims. (Musk later deleted the post, but not before it was viewed millions of times.)
X has faced particularly harsh criticism, but false or misleading content has infected virtually every online platform. Thierry Breton, a European Commission official overseeing a new law governing social media, sent letters this week warning X, TikTok and Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, about the prevalence of false and violent content from the conflict.
European regulators on Thursday took the first step toward an investigation of X under the new law, citing the prevalence of content posted by extremists, including gory images. X CEO Linda Yaccarino attempted to deflect the investigation by claiming the platform had removed “tens of thousands” of posts.
Imran Ahmed, director of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which is facing a lawsuit from Musk over his criticism of the platform, said the war had become a “turning point” for social media. The avalanche of misinformation since the war began meant the platforms were “not as relevant a place to get information” during a major event.
“Social media should not be trusted for information, period,” he said. “You can’t trust what you see on social media.”
Ahmed, who was in London, said he had become so frustrated in the early days of the war that he switched from the Internet to the BBC in search of reliable information. “When was the last time I turned on the TV?” he said.
He noted that social media companies had pulled resources to control what appeared online.
Musk has implemented a series of changes since acquiring the company last year that researchers say have resulted in an increase in harmful content, including racist and anti-Semitic comments. They include a subscription that allows anyone to pay for a blue check mark, which once conveyed an account’s sense of authority to users.
“X, in particular, has gone from a year ago being the first platform that people turned on and then stayed glued to in the middle of a crisis to a frankly unusable mess where it costs more effort than it’s worth to simply try to discern what is what is happening. TRUE.”
