Social media: A flood of grisly and often deceptive video
“The global town square is in ruins,” said Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic. “One-stop information destinations such as Facebook and Twitter are a thing of the past,” choked by the “tangled vegetation of a wild informational jungle.” During the first days of the Israel-Hamas war, Elon Musk “explicitly endorsed accounts that are known to share false information and express vile antisemitism.” Hamas terrorists gleefully seized on the lack of moderation on X, formerly Twitter, “to post violent, graphic videos to terrorize Israeli citizens.” Journalists, academics, and news junkies turning to Meta’s Threads have found the opposite experience: almost no news whatsoever as the platform has decided not to “amplify” news media. So much for the much-hyped Twitter alternative.
Violent images are all over X, said Mark Scott in Politico. “Sure, you can find this material on Instagram and YouTube, if you know where to look.” But Musk’s mass firings of content moderators has made his platform “by far the biggest purveyor” of nastiness. “A simple search on X—especially if you throw in some of the now viral hashtags associated with Hamas’ violence—serves up a steady stream of graphic content.”
“Social media companies must balance shielding users from violent, hateful, and misleading content against the goals of allowing free expression,” said Will Oremus and Naomi Nix in The Washington Post. That is not simple, and the rules have been changing on the fly. X, for instance, loosened its policies on violent videos last week to allow for more newsworthy material—some of which can even be important evidence of war crimes. Still, that has increased the toxicity of X, which is now filled with “posts and videos taken down by other platforms for violating their rules against graphic violence or hate speech.”
This war is a crisis for social media companies, said Steven Lee Myers in The New York Times. Social media was “heralded for its ability to document global events in real time.” Now there is so much false and misleading information that people are simply reflexively turning to anything that repeats the narrative they prefer. Europe has threatened X with fines for not quickly taking down false material, but fake videos—some taken from video games, or from years-old footage of other conflicts—go viral faster than they can be fact-checked. Meanwhile, largely through Telegram, Hamas has gotten its videos into circulation and “exploited social media to promote its cause the way al Qaida and the Islamic
State once did.” Social media once let ordinary people “break the information stranglehold” of authoritarian regimes. Now, increasingly, it is an outlet for propaganda.