Elon Musk’s Twitter is making the Israel - Hamas conflict worse

killing hundreds of people and taking dozens of hostages. BBC published a really helpful breakdown of what's going on and how we got here that we'll put in the show notes. BBC writes that although the attack was quote unexpected, it came at a time of soaring Israeli Palestinian tensions. This year has been the deadliest on record for Palestinians who live in the Israeli occupied West Bank, which could have motivated Hamas to strike Israel with a spectacular attack. Now,

this whole situation is truly heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking to hear about the laws of life in Israel, and it's heartbreaking to hear about what's happening to the Palestinian people. According to Axios, more than one thousand, five hundred and thirty Palestinians and one thousand, two hundred Israelis have been killed. Thousands more have been injured since the latest fighting between Israel and Hamas began. Hamas is believed to be holding

about one hundred and fifty hostages in Gaza. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs set on Friday the number of Palestinians displaced in Gaza has risen to over four hundred and twenty three thousand amid the intensified fighting and the things seem to be getting worse quickly.

According to Axios, the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the IDEF notified the human to evacuate its staff and to notify Palestinians living in northern Gaza that they should evacuate the southern part of the Gaza Strip in the next twenty four hours, which is really not something they could do. We're talking about over a million people, So yeah, it is a bad situation that is escalating quickly and making

everything worse. Is that Twitter, which at one time was the best place to follow rapidly changing global news and to get updates from folks on the ground during complex situations like this one, is completely broken. It's full of insidiary, inflammatory and false claims, and to me, it really taps into so much about what I know about disinformation, especially how disinformation functions to tap into emotional tense situations like

this one. Now, this obviously is not new, but what does feel new is just how bad things are now. Twitter is a platform that has always had its problems. I will be the first person to tell you about all of them. But before Elon Musk, it used to be the best platform for following breaking news stories as they unfolded. But now Twitter is simply not a place I can recommend people follow to get accurate information, Like I honestly feel like I need to say that one

more time and really emphasize it. At this point, I think whatever you read on Twitter, especially whatever you read about this specific conflict between Hamas and Israel, need to be taken with a huge grain of salt and really read with skepticism and critical thinking because Twitter is simply no longer a platform where accurate information can be counted on. And yes, you know, all social media platforms are like this to a degree. When some new diet fad or

new diet tip pops up on TikTok. You should definitely be wary of just taking it at face value. We've always known that about information we get on social media, but what's going on with Twitter specifically is different. As someone who studies disinformation and media, it is unlike anything I have ever seen, and I'm hearing the same thing from other folks in the disinformation space too, like political scientists.

Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, wrote, quote, 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. Justin Penden, an open source intelligence researcher, wrote, for many reasons, this is the hardest time I've ever had covering a crisis on here. Credible links are now photos on the ground.

News outlets struggle to reach audiences without an expensive blue check mark. Xenophobic goons are boosted by the platform. CEO end times, folks, And that's really what I've been seeing while trying to cover this on Twitter. You know, trying to make heads or tails of what's going on via Twitter necessitates so far beyond what you would think of as the normal critical thinking that we should all be

expected to have when we're engaging with content online. It is basically impossible to find out what's going on, make sense of it, and find out what's true and what's not. It's like Elon Musk's Twitter policies have turned Twitter into a place where nobody can tell what is going on and what the truth is, and honestly, it seems like

that is by design. I know that we joke about this a lot on the podcast, and I think it really comes from a place of like laugh to keep from crying, But this week was a really sobering reminder, at least for me, that this is real. The stakes are real, the stakes are very high, and I really have to say something that might not sound like me or like I usually sound on the podcast, which is that we are simply not prepared for how bad this is. We are simply not prepared for how much worse this

could get. So there are a few specific new Twitter policies under Elon Musk that I think are responsible for where we are today. The first is Elon's pay for a Verification scheme, where folks pay eight dollars to get blue check marks, it obscures who is a credible person, and people who pay for verification get their content algorithmically

amplified on the platform. Next is the new monetization scheme, where people can get paid for how much engagement their tweets get, And then last is that legit news articles now just show up as pictures with no text, thus making them hard to get any context at all when

scrolling by them. All of this has led to Twitter feeling like a place where you really cannot make heads or tails of anything, which is especially troubling when it comes to an emotionally charged, highly polarized, ongoing conflict like the one that we're seeing now. So one of the biggest issues is that it's just very difficult to verify what is being said on Twitter right now in a

crisis or a breaking new situation. The most important bit of digital hygiene that one can practice is not amplifying or spreading claims that are unverified, especially big claims that are sure to trigger an emotional response. It is a personal standard that I try to live by when I'm online, though it's often difficult just due to the nature of how social media platforms work. You know. I think Twitter is especially prone to making us want to move very

quickly because the platform has historically moved very quickly. So it takes a little bit of like mindfulness and I guess deprogramming to make yourself move a little bit slower and actually take a few steps to verify whatever you're seeing before just quickly smashing that retweet button. But on Twitter right now, verifying claims before spreading them is near impossible.

It used to be much easier, and that was one of the good things about having a legit verification program pre elon Musk, because if somebody had a blue check mark, you could click on their profile and be reasonably sure they were who they said they were. You know, you click on a journalist account with a blue check mark, at least you know, hey, the person making this claim has been verified to work at XYZ news, organization that

probably has some kind of journalistic standards. If they tweet something that is wrong, they will probably correct it or

have some kind of accountability around it. But now anyone can buy a blue check mark, which ensures that more of us will see their tweets because people who buy blue check marks have their content algorithmically prioritized on this new version of Twitter, And even though we all had that campaign of delegitimizing and like making fun of people who bought blue check marks, I do still feel like we might have a holdover feeling of a blue check

mark indicating accuracy, especially in times of crisis, because in a crisis, we're all moving quickly, just trying to quickly verify information, so it might take another moment or another additional layer of scrutiny for us to be like, wait, this blue check mark is actually meaningless. I shouldn't distrust what this person is saying at face value just because

they have the blue check mark. It's just another way that one of the very few guardrails that we had to depend on has now been removed, and how risky that is during times of crisis or confusion. So there are a few big claims that I saw about the attack on Israel that I was working to verify before amplifying. But one that I want to focus on is one that you might have heard, which is that hamas quote

beheaded forty infants. Cat ten Barge and Melissa chan Over at NBC had a really good breakdown of trying to verify this claim. Their piece was published on Thursday. We're recording this on Friday morning. This is a developing situation, so whatever I'm about to say, things might change after we actually publish this episode, so keep that in mind. NBC dug into where these viral claims about beheading babies came from and what we know about them now they right.

An IDEA of spokesperson told Business Insider on Tuesday that soldiers had found decapitated babies, but said Wednesday that it would not investigate or pervide further evidence regarding the claim. Late Wednesday, an IDF spokesperson sat on a video on Twitter that the IDF had relative confidence of the claims.

But on Wednesday, a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin net Yahoo told CNN that babies and toddlers were found with their heads decapitated in southern Israel after Hamas's attack, But Thursday morning, an Israeli official told CNN the government had not confirmed claims of the beheadings. A senior State Department official said Thursday morning the agency was not in

a position to confirm the beheading claims now. The nbcpiece suggests that the claim about the forty babies being beheaded came from one news report kind of being telephoned into

something else after it blew up on Twitter. Mark Owens Jones, an associate professor of Middle East Studies at Hamad bin Khalifa University and cutter who studies misinformation, told NBC News that he found the source of the forty beheaded babies allegations largely stemmed from one viral Israeli news broadcast clip from I twenty four News that did not specifically refer

to that allegation. Nicole Zadek, a correspondent for the privately owned Israeli news outlet I twenty four News, said in the video that Israeli soldiers told her that they'd found quote babies their heads cut off. The video has been viewed more than eleven million times on Twitter, according to its viewcounter, which might be inaccurate because Twitter might be inflating their reviewcounts. That's a conversation to a different day.

In another tweet, Zendeck wrote that the soldiers told her that they believe quote forty babies slash children were killed, not beheaded specifically. Mark Owen Jones said that somehow those two bits of information about a baby being found beheaded and forty babies or children being killed were connected, so the story became forty babies were beheaded and in the British press today about six or seven newspapers had it

on their front pages. An Idea of spokesperson Dorian Spielman told NBC News on Tuesday that he could not confirm I twenty four news's report, but this did not keep that claim from being repeated by President Biden, who said quote, I never really thought I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children. But soon after the White House clarified that Biden was referring to reports from Israel about beheaded children and cited several media reports of beheadings.

So why are these claims such a big deal? Because now they've kind of become part of how we understand what's happening, whether it's accurate or not, and they become part of the justification for escalation and sort of just become the truth of the situation, whether or not it

is grounded in fact. And BC reported that on Wednesday, the phrase did Hamas kill babies saw the biggest increase in search interest on Google of anything related to the war and that forty babies beheaded claim had over forty four million impressions on Twitter. Now, these claims are obviously highly emotionally resonant and disturbing. It's the kind of specific details that would get an emotional rise out of anyone.

But right now, as of Friday morning, I cannot tell you whether this incredibly viral claim that it's dominated the conversation is actually true or not. It might be true, it might be false, it might be somewhere in the middle.

And it strikes me that we ought to be able to verify a claim that forty four million different people engaged with, and like, I'm not even really sure how to describe this, but I have seen this vibe on Twitter where people are kind of pushing back against the idea that journalists would even need to or want to verify this claim before amplifying it, kind of making it seem like verifying it is a way to minimize the

horror of the situation. And I think that really shows the danger of making these kind of specific claims if they are not verified, because ultimately it makes the conversation

about that specific claim. You know that x amount of babies were killed in ex specific horrific way, and it becomes about trying to find out if that specific claim is true or not, you know, tracing the origins, researching it, all of that so that one specific, big claim becomes a sticking point that kind of takes us away from the larger conversation because here's the thing, that situation is truly awful. We don't need to add highly emotionally charged,

specific unsubstantiated claims to the conversation to understand that. And ultimately, I think that is the kind of climate that bad actors want, where it doesn't really matter what the truth is. It's how we get to a world where the truth and facts and the reality of what happened kind of don't matter.

my own eyes. So it is not in dispute that a Twitter account associated with Black Lives Matter Chicago did in fact tweet it out. But something that I know is that when people say Black Lives Matter as an entity,

they could be referring to a few different things. You know, there is the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization with all of the nonprofit like paperwork and certifications from the government like nine nineties, that was founded by Patrice Colors, opal Toametti and Alicia Garza.

There's Black Lives Matter state affiliates, There's people or groups who are sort of loosely associated with Black Lives Matter, and then there's Black Lives Matter kind of the movement, you know, where you may have somebody who has no official affiliation with any one organized group but is in solidarity with racial justice sort of generally and sort of

as a side note. One of the ways that we've kind of gotten here is through this vibe where anybody who is protesting against racial justice was being called quote, a Black Lives Matter activist, regardless of their affiliation with the actual organization, which just kind of created this nebulous idea that anybody who was black and against racial justice was somehow affiliated with Black Lives Matter, even if they

weren't so. A Twitter account called black Lives Matter Chicago did, in fact tweet out this image within picture of a Hamas fighter in a parachute, kind of glorifying the attack, and lots of people, you know, even elected officials, were condemning it, saying, oh, black Lives Matter is despicable for celebrating this attack on Israel and specifically saying things like, oh, well, this is why I never supported Black Lives Matter, or you know, black Lives Matter is anti Semitic, all of that.

But on October tenth, the Black Lives Matter Global Network, which is the Black Lives Matter nonprofit organization, basically said

we have no affiliation with that account. The statement reads, it has come to our attention that a number of right wing media outlets and far right moguls have been falsely claiming that Black Lives Matter organization issued those statements and then falsely claiming that Black Lives Matter showed up for Hermas and yet another effort to spread ANTIBLM propaganda based on screenshots from fake independent Twitter and Instagram, BLM branded accounts on social media please be advised the actual

Black Lives Matter organization, black Lives Matter Global Network, LLC, has not issued any statement in regard to the Israel Palestine conflict at all, and there are no plans to. BLM Chicago is an independently run Twitter account that is run by one individual and does not have any association with our company at all, nor is that Twitter account run by our organization, So any statement from any BLM branded account on social media claiming to support Palestine did

not come from our organization. Since day one of this war, high profile right wing media moguls on Twitter have been falsely trying to blame link BLM and Black people to this Israel Palestine conflict. There are literally over one hundred different BLM branded Twitter and Instagram accounts. People and independent online city chapters use our logo and brand for clout and to get more attention to their pages. We have

no legal ability to stop this. We have previously consulted with lawyers to stop others from using the Black Lives Matter branding and logo so that we cannot be blamed in the event one of these accounts says something controversial, but have not been successful in shutting down these fake

BLM accounts. So literally, anyone can create a Black Lives Matter branded account, No social media account from the actual Black Lives Matter organization will be issuing support or any press release regards to the Israel Palestine conflict at all. So basically, Black Lives Matter of the organization is saying this has nothing to do with us, This is just

one person acting independently. The Black Lives Matter Chicago accounts spent the last few days after posting the image defending it until eventually they deleted it, saying, yesterday we sent out messages that we aren't proud of. We stand with Palestine and the people who will do what they must to live free. Our hearts are with the grieving mothers, those rescuing babies from rubble who are in danger of being wiped out completely. But the damage is already done.

People seized on that one post and used at the paint all of Black Lives Matter or anyone even loosely affiliated with it, or really anybody black as endorsing that post. And of course this was just used to further stoke existing divisions. Lots of people were using that one social media post as a justification for where they don't support

racial justice. People tweeted that they were made to feel like they had to support Black Lives Matter back in twenty twenty and making it seem like now Black Lives Matter, and really black people in general were endorsing what happened

in Israel. Bad actors like the mostly Peaceful Meme account on Twitter, which is verified and has almost half a million followers, replied to Black Lives Matter Chicago's posts saying at mentioning Chick fil A, asking do you approve this message with a link showing that Chick fil a donated money to black nonprofits? Did Chick fil A donate money to Black Lives Matter or any Black Lives Matter affiliated organization? No,

they didn't. If you go to Chick fil A's website about the donations, the recipients are organizations like the Precious Lamb School, which supports babies who are experiencing homelessness. But the implication is that they are somehow associated with Black Lives Matter just because they are a black nonprofit, and thus they are responsible or need to answer for this one person's tweet and that Chick fil A also needs to answer for it too, because of their quote association

with them. Now, this is something that we need to be very very aware of. Bad actors will always use moments like these to try to exploit and inflame our very real existing tensions. Bad actors do not want us to be in solidarity with each other. They want us to be divided. They will exploit and inflame those divisions. Because when we're operating from a place of solidarity with each other, we are much less likely to fall for

their lives. So now more than ever, we all need to be operating from a place of empathy and genuine solidarity with each other. That is the only way to confront this. So there's unverified or difficult to verify claims, But we also have the issue of just fake or intentionally misrepresented claims flooding Twitter right now. On Saturday, a doctored White House news release posted online falsely claimed that Biden had authorized eight billion dollars in emergency a to Israel.

The fact that it was fake did not stop it from being posted across the Internet and rising to the top of Google search results. NBC reported that one of the first results on Google is a false article from the Mumbai based publication first post. The article appeared on the top stories module on Google, alongside articles by Axios

and The Wall Street Journal. Even though it's fake, it did not stop several news outlets from writing it up as if it were a real story, and then those news reports showing up with high prominence on Google Search. Verified accounts on Twitter were then sharing this fake White

House report. And keep in mind, verified accounts are eligible for Twitter's revenue sharing scheme if elon pays up, that is, and that means they can make money off of spreading lies and are incentivized to post things that get lots of eyeballs. Post sharing the fake document and its claims, many of which are still up, have accrued hundreds of

thousands of views on the platform. We've also seen several instances of old videos from older conflicts, or videos that are not even related to the conflict at all, being repurposed on Twitter with claims that they are from the current conflict. Shahan sar Darazade, journalists for BBC Verify, has even found video game footage being posted on Twitter purporting

to show the conflict. Think about that. You know, video games are designed specifically to look engaging in cinematic so of course when those videos are put on Twitter, they're going to rack up engagement and spread far and wide. It's basically an engagement farm. These accounts are incentivized by Twitter's current monetization program to tell these outlandish lies because they know they can make money from it.

to be appended to posts. Those posts are then voted on by other volunteers and eventually published after they reach a certain threshold of helpful votes from people with different points of view. According to Twitter, this is just a really ineffective way to fact check things, and basically it sounds like there is just too much inaccurate information on Twitter right now. That the Community Notes program just cannot

keep up. NBC looked at two viral claims related to the conflict, the Doctorated Press released saying that Biden had approved billions in aid and a debunked claim that an Orthodox church in Gaza was destroyed. Only eight percent of one hundred and twenty posts related to those stories had published community notes, while twenty six percent had unpublished notes from volunteers that had yet to be approved. About two thirds of the top post NBC News reviewed had no

proposed or published community notes on them. So just debunked false information with no fact check or note whatsoever on Twitter to be viewed, amplified, spread, and monetized. Kim Picazio, a community notes volunteer, wrote on Instagram threads all weekend we were furiously vetting, writing and approving community notes on

hundreds of posts which were demonstrably fake news. It took two plus days for the back room to press whatever button to find only make all of our warnings publicly viewable by that time, you know the rest of that sentence. Pacazio told NBC News that she ended up just tweeting out proposed community notes herself in response to misinformation out of total frustration. Which I completely understand that frustration, because this system does not work, and it seems like Twitter

has kind of realized that it's not working. According to a post from at community Notes on October third, Twitter wrote, starting today, notes will appear on average of one point five hours faster, and as much as three point five hours faster in some cases. Twitter's new maybe CEO, Linda Yakarino added, community notes now appear more quickly on x They're a vital tool for adding context, of combating potential misinformation.

Become part of this important community. And I just find it gross that she is talking about this like it's some cool new bell or whistle that people should be excited about, as opposed to an obviously ineffective way to approach what should be a standard infrastructure of how platform as important as Twitter should be responsibly run. Because here's

the thing. Twitter should not be depending on a crew of frustrated volunteers to ensure that false information that could actually put people's lives in danger is not being amplified and monetized on the platform they run. You know, these people are volunteers, are not even being paid, And even Elon Musk seemed to see this as an issue, he tweeted, as always, please try to stay as close to the

truth as possible, even for stuff you don't like. But that was after he himself was telling his forty four million followers to follow accounts known for amplifying lies in

anti semitism. Must suggested that folks follow War Monitors and scent Defender quote for following the war in real time, but both of these accounts spread a false claim that there had been an explosion near the White House back in May, and the War Monitors account that Elon suggested folks follow has a history of posting anti Semitic comments

on Twitter. The account replied to a post from Kanye Wes during his anti Semitic meltdown, adding quote the overwhelming majority of people in the media and banks are Zionists, while telling another Twitter user in June to go worship a jew little bro Now. Musk did eventually delete that post suggesting that people follow those two accounts for news about the conflict, but he did so after it was up for three hours and viewed by eleven million people.

So to be clear, I think this is particularly bad on Twitter right now, and I'm not alone. Business insiders spoke to Sandra vander Linden, a professor at the University of Cambridge and author A fool Proof Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity, who said I would be fairly confident to say that a lot of what we're seeing right now is a direct result of

the policy changes that were implemented by Musk. Vander Linden said that Musk's early changes to the platform, including gutting the trust and Safety team, changing the verification process, and introducing monetized content, are not only allowing but also motivating the supread of misinformation on the platform. The fact that people with verified a cat can monetize their content means

they have the wrong incentive, he said. They're incentivized to spread content that's going to get engagement, clicks and ultimately make them money. Whatever polarizing images they can find, whether it's real or fake, is going to elicit clicks, which I think is part of how we got to where we are today. Now, there might be a silver lining

because a change might be coming. EU Commissioner Theory Breton served Musk and other social media platforms with a letter giving them twenty four hours to comply with our request for information about how Twitter is following EU's Digital Services Act, which has very strict rules about how platform handle inaccurate

information and material from extremist groups. And of course, because it's Elon Musk we're talking about, Musk basically tried to bait Theory Brenton into a public fight, demanding that the EU publicly posts the violations that Twitter is responsible for, which like, give me a break, Like you can just look with your eyes and see the violations that Twitter res responsible for. Like anybody who was been on Twitter at all the last week could probably tell you, or

you could just listen to this podcast. So why does any of this matter? Well, Twitter has historically been a platform where elected officials and policy and newsmakers spend a lot of time. These are the folks who are getting a lot of their information from Twitter. So if it's full of emotionally charged, inaccurate information that is impossible to verify, that's really not good. And when you add in things like AI generated deep fake images, I think it's only

going to get worse. And this is one of the reasons why our digital ecosystem just feels so irreparably broken. We have a real problem if one billionaire can single handedly buy one of our most important platforms for information and not just make it useless but dangerous. So what can we do in the meantime? Well, I will repeat this until the cows come home. Twitter is not your friend right now. Do not take anything that you see

on Twitter right now at face value. You, especially if you do not have an hour to spend doing background research into whatever claim you're seeing there now, to be clear, that is not right. That should not be the standard. Everyday people should not have to do that level of research, you know, while they're scrolling their morning coffee, just to verify what they're seeing. We deserve a digital media landscape that you can trust within reason. We shouldn't have to

do any of this. We deserve a better platform. But until then, it is so important that all of us really understand how bad Twitter has gotten and act accordingly. Look to trusted news sources for information about the conflict Beyond Twitter, professional journalists at established outlets that have standards, And while you should always be thinking critically about everything that you read in general, you can usually have confidence that a big, established media outlet or newspaper is going

to verify facts before printing them. And the last thing I'll leave you with is just the importance of all of us leading with empathy right now. You know, people are suffering, people are scared, people are mourning, and things are likely about to get worse. Bad actors they are counting on us giving into that fear, that anxiety, that distrust and that chaos and really being reactionary. Those are perfect conditions for people who are interested in spreading lies

and chaos. And the best thing we can do in this climate is have empathy for each other and move in genuine solidarity with one another, because we really are stronger together and that's the only way that we're going to make it through. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi? You can reach us at Hello at tegody dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tengoity dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by

me Bridgitad. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed creative Jonathan Stricklet as our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Almato is our contributing producer, I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review.