Who wrote, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on."? Ask Google and you'll see an answer, sourced to a tweet from a bestselling author, sourcing the quote from Mark Twain. Ironically, that itself is false.
The truth has laced up those boots; you'll also find several articles debunking the Twain claim. Still, thanks to Twitter/X and Google failing to pay attention, the lie has completed its trip and is now etched into the fabric of the internet.
If Big Tech can do this to a century-old quote, what hope remains for breaking news? In the wake of terror group Hamas' horrific attack on Israel, and Israel's push back into a territory filled with Palestinian civilians, the internet is filling up with disinformation pushed by partisans and bots on both sides.
According to an analysis of 2 million posts on Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok by Tel Aviv-based disinformation detection firm Cyabra, a quarter of all accounts posting about the war were fake. Collectively, their posts have been seen more than half a billion times.
SEE ALSO: Never trust a single source: The new rules for learning anything onlineBut don't despair. Even as tech firms like X have cut their trust and safety teams to the bone, users are fighting back and educating each other.
To fight lies in this climate, we're all going to have to get our boots on.
Fact and fiction in the Middle East
Here are some of the fastest-traveling fictions from the first few days of the conflict:
An account on Twitter/X with a quarter-million followers and a Palestinian flag in its profile purported to show Israeli helicopters blasted by rockets. In fact, it was a YouTube short taken from the video game Arma 3. At time of writing, the tweet has been viewed 10 million times and remains up.
A second clip from Arma 3, posted to TikTok with the caption "Israeli attack begins," spread on Twitter/X via multiple accounts.
Elon Musk, owner of the company formerly known as Twitter, recommended that his 140 million followers get news on the conflict via two accounts known for antisemitic tweets. Both accounts posted disinformation about a nonexistent explosion at the White House earlier in 2023. Musk has since deleted his recommendation tweet, without comment.
Ian Miles Cheong, a Twitter user from Malaysia who frequently interacts with Musk, posted a video on the platform claiming to show that "Hamas is going from house to house, butchering the people inside." In fact, the video clearly shows Israeli police entering a home. Cheong's tweet was viewed more than 12 million times before the post was deleted.
A post by a self-proclaimed "investigative journalist" and blogger insisted that Israel had bombed an ancient church in Gaza. The church in question took to Facebook to confirm it still exists: "The news you spread is nothing more than rumors." The user in question tweeted about the church's response...but didn't take down or clarify his original post, viewed more than 3 million times.
An anonymous Twitter user posted a fake White House press release, claiming the U.S. government just authorized an additional $8 billion in funding for Israel. The original tweet was deleted; the $8 billion figure was repeated widely on social media.
A video of security services in Azerbaijan arresting a separatist leader was posted multiple times on multiple platforms, claiming to show Israeli generals captured by Hamas.
A video taken from Facebook, claiming to show the aftermath of Israeli bombs in Gaza, was actually fireworks in Algeria in the wake of a soccer team's 2020 victory.
A video purporting to show Hamas firing rockets into Israel was taken from Syria in 2020. (You get the picture: Videos are especially prone to being taken out of context.)
The list goes on, much of it amplified by right-wing U.S. media with an agenda. Taliban fighters plan to somehow march across the Middle East and fight alongside Hamas, according to a new Twitter/X account that was quickly removed. The Taliban has never fought outside Afghanistan, but that didn't stop Gateway Pundit from writing a credulous article.
Many influencers know they're peddling lies, and barely bother to correct themselves. Far-right podcaster Joey Mannarino claimed in a tweet that Ukraine was selling weapons to Hamas. Only after his tweet went viral (it has been viewed more than 7 million times) did Mannarino add an ass-covering: "For the record, we don't know if this is true or not."
X marks the spot — not
It's not hard to see the common thread in all this disinformation. Indeed, it's hardly news that Twitter/X has become a cesspool under Musk — one that makes Facebook, YouTube, and even TikTok look like paragons of clarity.
So much so that European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton just put Musk on blast for very likely breaking the EU's new Digital Services Act:
There's no secret to how this happened. Musk removed verification badges from experts in various fields, and instead gave them to anyone who sends him money. He fired the vast majority of teams devoted to identifying and removing disinformation. His new monetization strategy means accounts have an incentive to create controversial posts. And most recently, in a desperate bid to keep people on his platform, derided even by his fans, he removed headlines from links in tweets.
In recent months, according to The Information, Musk removed an internal software tool that could spot when a lot of accounts share the same posts — a godsend for bad actors looking to share disinformation as widely as possible. And in recent days, some users have started complaining that the Twitter/X translation function has stopped working, at what is clearly the worst possible time.
We could (and do) argue endlessly about why Musk is doing this. Is he merely clueless about the media, with a genuine belief in the kind of "citizen journalism" that just happens to align with his biases? Is this a kind of revenge for all the times his own false claims about Tesla and SpaceX were debunked? Or is there deliberate intent to align himself with authoritarian regimes and tear down a platform that has been used to oppose him?
For the purposes of getting the truth about the Israel-Hamas conflict right now, Musk's motive doesn't matter. All we need to note is that any information that originated on his platform should be treated with maximum suspicion — especially if the user in question has a blue check.
The truth strikes back
One positive factor in all this fog of war on Twitter/X: Community Notes. Almost all of the fake tweets listed above has had one of these fact-checking notes appended. The company's Community Notes team says more than 500 notes relating to the conflict have been appended to tweets — and that when people post videos already identified as fake, the relevant Community Note is automatically added.
Now, that isn't as good as the long-held tradition for Twitter users acting in good faith: deleting a tweet when it's wrong, and owning up to the mistake in a separate tweet. (With all those monetization dollars at stake, why would a scam artist delete a popular post?)
Nonetheless, it's a positive sign; even on a platform with a declining user base, a platform filled with bad actors incentivized to make sensational content, users still care enough to correct them. (Notes users seem particularly exasperated with Cheong in this instance, noting that he is frequently tagged for disinformation.)
The other good news is that disinformation experts are in agreement on how we can improve the situation. Doesn't matter whether it's the Center for Countering Digital Hate, or BBC Verify, or the director of the Poynter Institute's digital media literacy initiative, MediaWise, or conspiracy theory trackers like Mike Rothschild, author of the best deep dive into QAnon. All their best practices boil down to one simple rule:
Consider the source.
The internet is "a maze filled with trap doors and blind alleys, where things are not always what they seem," according to Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew at the Stanford School of Education. In a 2017 study, the pair found that even Stanford historians could be taken in by fake news. "Very intelligent people were bamboozled by the ruses that are part of the toolkit of digital deception" such as a professional-looking letterhead, Wineburg said at the time.
That fact was underlined early in the Israel-Hamas conflict, when a prominent intelligence researcher fell for a fake "Jerusalam Post" Twitter/X account claiming that Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been hospitalized, without seeing the misspelling in the account name. (The account has since been suspended.)
Meanwhile, professional fact-checkers in the Stanford study did not fall for the honey traps that the researchers laid. That's because they "read laterally" — in other words, they open up more tabs, searching for the name of the reporter, the name of the outlet, any other sites that have reported the story. With a lateral read, red flags are much easier to spot.
You don't have to open a dozen tabs any time you want to share a post, of course. But a little skepticism goes a long way. I wrote a set of rules for learning anything online two years ago, and every point still stands. Examine your own confirmation bias, and that of the person who shared the post in question.
In this case, if the post happens to dovetail with your positions on the Middle East crisis, and theirs, it may be too good to be true — and you may save face by waiting to see if more accounts and major media outlets confirm the contents.
It is on you, on all of us, to do what we can to fight the disease of disinformation — before these viral videos fly halfway around the world.There may be much, much worse ahead, given that Hamas militants have threatened to execute Israeli hostages on videos that would then be shared widely on social media. You may want to follow advice on how to stop videos autoplaying, so that in the event these videos are monetized by Musk's bad actors, you're not contributing.
The conflict is bad enough. We who are far from the front lines can only make the discourse around it better or worse. It is on you, on all of us, to do what we can to fight the disease of disinformation — before these viral videos fly halfway around the world.
