- Experts said changes to Twitter, now known as X, under Elon Musk have created a platform ripe for the spread of misinformation
Misinformation about the conflict in Israel is spreading across X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, with users sharing misleading information about the attacks.
The spread of viral misinformation during a conflict isn’t new, but changes made to the platform under Elon Musk’s leadership appear to be exacerbating concerns among experts around accessing reliable information online.
“I don’t think that technology platforms are prepared for events like this. Misinformation and harmful content has always been a problem on social media. I think that this weekend’s events in Israel have demonstrated that,” said Caitlin Chin-Rothman, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
“Especially Twitter, I would say, has really degraded its content moderation abilities,” Chin-Rothman added.
False claims have spread across X since the Saturday launch of Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel, including posts of prior Israeli airstrikes being misrepresented as recent, and false claims of the U.S. sending a multi-billion dollar aid package to Israel.
Other false claims have spread from accounts posing as official news outlets, according to a compilation of examples cited in a report published by the left-leaning watchdog Media Matters for America.
X’s trust and safety team said in a post late Monday it is “laser focused and dedicated to protecting the conversation on X and enforcing our rule as we continue to assess the situation on the platform.”
The team said they took action to remove newly created Hamas-affiliated accounts, along with “tens of thousands of posts” including graphic media, violent speech and hateful conduct.
The X trust and safety team has also leaned on “community notes” on posts. The program allows users to sign up to become contributors and create notes on posts for context. Users can also rate posts on their helpfulness.
Despite those efforts, experts and advocates said X has become a minefield of misinformation.
How Musk changed X
Chin-Rothman said X looks “completely different than it did this time a year ago.”
Musk has imposed several changes to the platform after buying last year for $44 billion with the stated goal of breaking down what he considered barriers to free speech.
The company rolled back content moderation measures — and cut staffers tasked with those responsibilities. X also changed the verification process to strip public figures of blue check marks to denote their authenticity and instead allow users to pay for the symbols.
Most recently, X stopped showing headlines on posts containing links to articles. Posts now only display the lead image of a story and link to it through that image.
Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, said Musk has created a “perfect storm” on X for the proliferation of misinformation about Israel.
“It’s a sobering but unsurprising moment that brings further clarity to how important content moderation and commitments to platform integrity are,” Benavidez said.
In addition to letting users pay for blue checkmarks, X also now allows users who pay for the premium version of the site to monetize their content through an ads revenue sharing program. Paying users with at least 5 million “organic impressions” on their cumulative posts in the last three months and at least 500 followers are eligible for the program.
Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said Musk’s changes to Twitter have changed the “incentive structure” for the way people talk about and share information about the conflict.
“He’s opened the door more than ever for people to become self appointed experts, open source analysts, even if they’re not experts, and even if they’re not doing any real open source analysis,” Brooking said.
“They can present themselves as such. There’s no easy way to check their claims. They can combine a mix of truth and falsehood and editorial causation and they can command incredible view counts and shares and in some cases, even get endorsed by Elon Musk himself,” Brooking said.
X users wade through misinformation
Musk recommended Sunday users check two accounts, “WarMonitors” and “Sentdefender” to follow the “war in real-time,” The Washington Post reported. Both of those accounts were among the spreaders of a false claim in May that there was an explosion near the White House, the Post reported.
Musk’s post was later deleted but it was viewed 11 million times in three hours before it was taken down, according to the Post.
Chin-Rothman said the amount of spam on the platform has made it hard for readers to “parse through and find reliable news accounts.”
A fake document made to look like a White House press release that authorized $8 billion in emergency aid to Israel on Saturday circulated online, NBC News reported.
Posts sharing the false image and its claims accrued hundreds of thousands of views on X, and only some of them were given “community notes” attached that clarified the document is fake, according to the report.
In another instance a video posted on Facebook and X mislabeled an Israeli airstrike as happening over the weekend, when in fact it was from May, Reuters reported. The video appears to have been taken down on Facebook. The Hill reached out to Facebook parent company Meta for comment.
On X, a post with the video is still present but contains a note that it was “presented out of context” and leads users to a link to “find out more.”
In another post, an account called the Jerusalem Post, misspelling the city’s name as “Jerusalam” in the handle, said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was ill and taken to a hospital. The post was seen over 500,000 times, Forbes reported.
That account has since been suspended on X. A spokesperson for X did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Unusable in this crisis’
Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a group that tracks online misinformation, said X has been “unusable in this crisis.” CCDH has been a vocal critic of X in the past and is facing a lawsuit from the company over prior reports about misinformation on the platform.
Ahmed said for every other major news event that has broken in the last 10 years the first thing he’s done is go to Twitter to see what the world is saying. In this case, he said it’s been impossible to do because it isn’t feasible to discern what is real and what is not.
“The whole value proposition was when something happens, [Twitter is] where everyone goes to talk about it and find out more information,” Ahmed said.
Musk has “broken that,” Ahmed said.
“It is basically a playground for disinformation actors,” he added.
Benavidez said X users can slow down and question the information in front of them when on the platform. But, at the end of the day, she said the responsibility is on Musk and X to provide users with a viable platform committed to integrity.
“Which I think it has failed to do,” she said.
@The HILL
