From Israel to Gaza through fake news and propaganda

The conflict in the Middle East is giving rise to an unprecedented escalation of fake news and online propaganda.A stress test for social networks like X.

Since the invasion of Israel by Hamas, i social networks have become filled with all kinds of content on the conflict.Especially on as Weapon 3.The latter is a 2013 title - not too recent, therefore - whose scenes were passed off online as "real", with excellent results, gathering half a million views on Twitter and three and a half million on TikTok.

Dramatic and sudden events like those underway have always been the ideal target for campaigns misinformation on social networks.Particularly starting from 2016, after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump At the White House, the major platforms began a slow – and controversial – reform program, giving greater weight and importance to content moderation.A campaign has run out since 2021, after Donald Trump was banned from the most well-known social networks (following his support for the protesters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021), and has since left the led to a sort of "counter-reformation" which loosened the constraints of content moderation. Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter it was perhaps the pivotal event that marked the beginning of a new season of platform laissez-faire.

In short, fake news like those seen in recent days there have always been:What was surprising, if anything, was the speed with which they spread, as well as the lack of moderation.After all, one of Musk's first decisions as owner of Twitter was to fire most of the company's employees, especially the teams responsible for moderating content and prosecuting the most annoying users.The results of the resulting wild west are evident now, along with a general transformation of the X feed, which some say is result “useless” to those who wanted to follow the conflict between Israel and Gaza.This is important news:from the Arab Spring of 2012 onwards, Twitter was "the" favorite social network for those who wanted to inform and find out about similar events, attracting an audience of activists, journalists and enthusiasts.Not anymore, apparently.

As for Tiktok, the situation is thorny given the power of the recommendation algorithm, capable of identifying the "right" contents for a certain type of user, often creating information bubbles where conspiracy theories and hoaxes circulate.It is no coincidence that both X and Tiktok were publicly taken up by the European Union in the person of Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services, who in a letter addressed to the CEO of Tiktok and that of Alphabet (which includes Youtube, another platform in question), drew attention to "a wave of illegal content and disinformation" which would violate European legislation, the Digital Services Act.

Ongoing conflict can serve as a stress test for platforms, especially in view of the next US elections, scheduled for next year:a traumatic event that tests a system to identify its solidity and any critical points.Well, if this is what it is, we can say that the platforms have not overcome it;indeed, in some cases, they seem ready to repeat the mistakes made in the previous decade, while artificial intelligences, capable of churning out videos, contents and messages of every kind, are now making the work of the troll farms that produce fake news easier. like, in an instant.