Misinformation about the Israeli-hamas war is rampant. Here’s how to fight it
The fog of the Israeli-hamas war is made more intimidating by the thick mist of misinformation.
What are smart news consumers, and impressionable students in classrooms nationwide, supposed to do as rampant falsehoods spread as we begin to observe U.S. Media Literacy Week?
Newsguard, the anti-misinformation company I work for, is toiling 24/7 with a tsunami of wrongheaded claims about the conflict. The fog and mist sweep globally by social media, notably “verified” accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter, as we find in these false or unsubstantiated print and video claims:
– Ukraine sold weapons to Hamas.
– Israel has killed 33,000 Palestinian children since 2008.
– A video shows Israeli or Palestinian children in cages.
– A video shows Israeli senior officials captured by Hamas.
– The St. Porphyrios Orthodox Church in Gaza was destroyed by Israeli bombing
– A video shows Hamas fighters celebrating the abduction of an Israeli toddler.
– CNN staged footage of its news crew under attack in Israel.
– A White House memo shows that the U.S. approved $8 billion in aid for Israel.
– Israel staged footage showing the death of a child killed by a Hamas strike.
– The Hamas attack was a “false flag” carried out by Israel or the West.
Collectively, posts advancing these myths received at least 1.35 million engagements and were cumulatively viewed more than 100 million times globally in just one week, according to my colleagues Jack Brewster, Sam Howard and Becca Schimmel.
They underscore how, when he is
derided for growing misinformation on X, owner Elon Musk heralds a crowdsourced factchecking feature called Community Notes. But my colleagues found that only 79 of 250 posts, or a meager 32%, advancing misinformation about the war were flagged with a Community Note.
Add the copious amount of false or unsubstantiated information about the war on Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Telegram and elsewhere, and you have a dismaying mountain of the misleading.
Now, most of us can’t be as lucky as a White House reporter traveling on Air Force One with President Joe Biden as he returned from Israel on Thursday.
The reporter stood a few feet from Biden, held up her phone and informed him of an Israeli news site alert: “Biden officials have indicated to Israel in recent days that if Hezbollah initiates a war against Israel, the U.S. military will join the IDF in fighting the terrorist group.”
“Not true. It was never said,” Biden immediately responded.
Well, if you aren’t standing next to the president of the United States, or another reputable source, then who might forcefully debunk the false content you are consuming? Maybe you’re a high school sophomore fiddling with an iphone in a school cafeteria, and you’re being bombarded with alerts about a K-pop star, an injured NFL
quarterback or, yes, a deadly war.
Anthony Powers, the librarian at Depaul College Prep on Chicago’s North Side, told us: “In a school setting, I believe that the most effective way to combat the tidal wave of mis/disinformation on any controversial topic is for the educators at the institution to curate their own lists of trusted sources on a topic.”
Teachers, librarians and administrators “have to take advantage of the bully pulpit that they have to present to their students a preferred list of resources for better understanding of an issue or topic. I believe, not naively I hope, that the majority of students will opt to follow a teacher’s guidance on a topic when given an option between that and searching on their
own for information,” Powers added.
That means being proactive in disseminating credible information about events such as the war, and media literacy in general. Most schools do not, and a 2022 law that made Illinois the first state to require a unit of media literacy education as a prerequisite for high school graduation languishes with no implementation.
So, with Media Literacy Week beginning, Powers does what he can and valiantly assists faculty and staff members with credible resources to share with students.
And now we have a war to buttress his convictions about the need of truth.
Jim Warren is executive editor of Newsguard.