Social media is a good place to get a lot of bad information. That’s not a new problem, but it’s particularly acute right now, during a war between Israel and Hamas.
The temptation is to put the blame for this at the feet of Elon Musk, who has seemingly tried to increase the amount of unreliable stuff on Twitter since he bought the service a year ago. You can also rail against TikTok, with its enormous influence and black-box algorithm. You can also point a finger at Telegram, a messaging service for much of the world that barely pays lip service to moderation. Then there’s Meta and YouTube and other platforms which continue to invest heavily in content moderation but are still swamped with this stuff, simply because there’s so much of this stuff.
I’m happy to cast the shame net widely. But I also think people complaining about inaccurate information on their platform of choice during a brutal conflict are also going to have to come to grips with a difficult reality: Getting the “right” info during a war — especially in real time or close to it, when that news is happening in a place where journalists may have limited access and are under dire threat themselves — is an inherently difficult exercise that may never get you the results you want.
Last week’s deadly explosion at a Gaza hospital is the newest data point in that argument: Hamas immediately blamed the strike on Israeli rockets, and initial reports from news outlets including the New York Times ran with that framing; Israel subsequently blamed an errant Palestinian missile launched from inside Gaza.
As I’m typing this, a week later, the consensus — at least in Western media — seems to have shifted toward the Israeli explanation. Meanwhile, the Times published an editor’s note on Monday that says its initial coverage “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas” and “left readers with an incorrect impression”; the paper’s most recent coverage of the blast doesn’t say…
Read the full article here
