Here’s how social media companies are handling misinformation in the Israel-Hamas war

Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel and Israel’s subsequent responses have resulted in a flood of misinformation on social media platforms, threatening to make a very bad situation much worse.

Users have rushed to sites like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter/X for information, but they are also finding hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation from bad actors and conspiracy theorists.

Schools in Israel, as well as some in the U.S., are urging parents to delete social media apps from their children’s phones to avoid the risk of them being exposed to disturbing images. That’s causing social media companies to put new policies into effect and to clamp down on enforcement of existing ones.

Twitter/X

The site formerly known as Twitter came under fire soon after the conflict started, due to the volume of posts with graphic content, hate speech, and misinformation. The European Commission’s digital rights chief, Thierry Breton, in a letter sent to Elon Musk on October 10, said some of the imagery online included “repurposed old images of unrelated armed conflicts or military footage that actually originated from video games. This appears to be manifestly false or misleading information.”

Breton added that the site “must be timely, diligent and objective” in removing potentially illegal content.

Musk’s initial pushback to Breton’s letter, which followed his (since deleted) recommendation that users follow an account known for spreading disinformation, stoked additional concerns.

Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at the platform, tells Fast Company that X is complying with the EU’s request to “have in place proportionate and effective mitigation measures to tackle the risks to public security and civic discourse stemming from disinformation.”

Benarroch wrote, “Safeguarding our platform is top of mind. To meet this specific moment, Linda Yaccarino, CEO, X has stood up the entire company by redistributing resources, refocused internal teams and activated more partners externally to address this rapidly evolving situation. And our teams are working around the clock to ensure everyone has access to real-time information, and safeguard the platform for all our users.”

The company is relying largely on Community Notes, its tool that lets people add context to potentially misleading posts, to do so.

“Collectively, notes across the platform are now being seen tens of millions of times per day, generating north of 85 million impressions in the last week,” the company said in a post Saturday. “Notes are appearing more quickly and on far more posts than they were just weeks ago. Over the past week, we made several improvements that help show notes on images and videos on more posts with matching media. In fact, some individual notes are matching hundreds of posts and some singular notes are being seen over 1M times.”

Despite that, concerns persist. One fake Mossad account (now restricted) showed a scene from a video game and described it as Israel’s Iron Beam directed energy weapon air defense system. And there are reports the company shut down a software tool designed to identify organized misinformation in the months before the Gaza conflict.

TikTok

TikTok, meanwhile, has been overrun with both disturbing real scenes of violence as well as misinformation. The company says it has launched a command center for its safety team and is evolving its automated detection systems in real time as it identifies new threats. It has also added more moderators who speak Arabic and Hebrew to review content and is removing content that either supports the terrorist attacks or mocks victims of the violence.

“If content is posted depicting a person who has been taken hostage, we will do everything we can to protect their dignity and remove content that breaks our rules,” the company said in an update. “We do not tolerate attempts to incite violence or spread hateful ideologies. We have a zero-tolerance policy for content praising violent and hateful organizations and individuals, and those organizations and individuals aren’t allowed on our platform. We also block hashtags that promote violence or otherwise break our rules.”

TikTok says it is also adding opt-in screens over content that could be graphic, putting additional restrictions on LIVE eligibility and working with both global law enforcement and groups such as Tech Against Terrorism to safeguard the platform. And reminders will soon appear in search for certain keywords to warn the community of potential misinformation.

TikTok has put a greater emphasis on battling misinformation since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when it updated users about its efforts to thwart false narratives, earning praise from observers. Between mid-June and mid-December 2022, TikTok said it took down more than 36,500 videos across Europe that violated its harmful misinformation policy.

Facebook and Instagram

Meta says that it, too, is expanding efforts to fight misinformation, launching a special operations center with experts who speak Arabic and Hebrew. It says it has also temporarily lowered the threshold that triggers its technology preventing content that could violate its rules from being amplified.

“In the three days following October 7, we removed or marked as disturbing more than 795,000 pieces of content for violating these policies in Hebrew and Arabic,” the company wrote in a blog post. “As compared to the two months prior, in the three days following October 7, we have removed seven times as many pieces of content on a daily basis for violating our Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy in Hebrew and Arabic alone.”

Meta has also restricted several hashtags on Instagram after finding that content associated with them regularly violated its community guidelines and says it is closely monitoring Facebook and Instagram Live, following Hamas threats to broadcast footage of the hostages.

“We’re taking these threats extremely seriously,” Meta said. “Our teams are monitoring this closely, and would swiftly remove any such content (and the accounts behind it), banking the content in our systems to prevent copies being re-shared.”

The company says it is also working with third-party fact-checkers to debunk false claims. When those groups label a post as false, however, it is not being taken down, but is simply being moved lower in the sites’ feed “so fewer people can see it.”

While social media might seem the most efficient way to learn what’s happening in real time, experts warn that bad actors are eager to capitalize on that—and extra caution is warranted.

“Major world events bring a flood of misinformation to social media and other digital platforms. The conflict between Israel and Palestine is no different,” said Chris Olson, cofounder and CEO of the Media Trust. “Online users: You’re being targeted. Stay vigilant, and double check everything. . . . With the tensions at play here, online misinformation has very real consequences, which have the potential to cause some major financial as well as personal damage.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/90967860/israel-hamas-war-social-media-companies-misinformation?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss