Hours after Hamas, the armed Palestinian group, attacked Israel on Saturday, X, the social network owned by the world’s richest man Elon Musk was awash with fake videos, photos and misleading information about the conflict.
“Imagine if this was happening in our neighbourhood, to your family,” posted Ian Miles Cheong, a far-right commentator whom Musk interacts with often, along with a video that he claimed showed Palestinian fighters killing Israeli citizens.
A Community Note, an X feature that lets users add context to posts, stated that the people in the clip were members of Israeli law enforcement, not Hamas.
But the video is still up and has racked up millions of impressions. And hundreds of other X accounts have shared the clip on the platform, some of them with verified check marks, an Al Jazeera search showed.
Disinformation – fake news that is spread deliberately – about the war and the Israel-Palestine conflict in general spread across other social networks like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok too, but thanks to Musk’s revamped policies that let anyone pay to be verified as well as large scale layoffs in X’s Trust and Safety teams, the platform appears to have seen the worst of it.
X, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, TikTok, and BlueSky, did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
Post from www.aljazeera.com