On Tuesday the European Commission issued a letter to Musk warning him over alleged disinformation on X about the Hamas attack on Israel, including fake news and “repurposed old images”. He has also engaged with or posted content targeting the Hungarian-American businessman and philanthropist George Soros, who has been a regular target for conspiracy theorists. The league, said antisemitic posts on X increased sharply after Musk bought the site, prompting him to threaten to sue. While he said in a post that he was “pro-free speech, but against antisemitism of any kind”, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, accused him of “amplifying” messages from neo-Nazis. In recent weeks, Musk has been criticised over the spread of antisemitic content on the platform. X has introduced Community Notes, a programme for crowdsourced moderation that largely places the onus on users to correct facts instead of employed content moderators. In the past year, Musk has fired two heads of trust and safety on X, and is locked in a legal dispute with his co-lead of threat disruption at X, whose responsibilities included advising leadership on “vision and strategy for content moderation”. The company said it had plans to reorganise this team, but they remain unclear. Since his takeover and rebranding of Twitter in 2022, Musk dissolved the platform’s Trust and Safety Council, which was responsible for addressing global content moderation and hate speech and harassment. He said it was being pushed by Russian social media users but added it was unclear if this was a Russian government disinformation campaign or a grassroots effort.Īt the centre of growing concerns over fake news related to the Israel-Hamas conflict is Elon Musk, the owner of X and a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” who has faced serious accusations of disseminating conspiracy theories and antisemitism on the platform, which he denies. In February, the Pentagon’s inspector general reported that there was no evidence to date of weapons and aid to Ukraine being diverted to third parties, while Ukrainian intelligence this week accused Russia of placing “trophy” western weapons seized from battlefields in Ukraine with Hamas to undermine support for Kyiv.Įliot Higgins, the founder of the investigative outlet Bellingcat, also flagged up a fake video purporting to be from the BBC that claimed to feature a Bellingcat investigation showing Ukraine smuggled weapons to Hamas. It has since been viewed more than 300,000 times and amplified by far-right accounts from the US. On Monday the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, tweeted: “Well, Nato buddies, you’ve really got it, haven’t you? The weapons handed to the Nazi regime in Ukraine are now being actively used against Israel.”Īnother video, apparently showing Hamas thanking Ukraine for the sale of weapons it plans to use against Israel, was posted by an X account linked to the Russian mercenary group Wagner. Russia has been a longstanding culprit for spreading disinformation on X, and appears to have been capitalising on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The White House confirmed to NBC that the document was fake. There is no such document on the White House website or social media. The faked memo was an edited version of the US president’s July memo where he announced $400m in aid to Ukraine. In actuality, the video was originally published by the official YouTube channel of the state security service of Azerbaijan last week, and shows arrested former leaders of the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh government.Ī doctored document suggesting that Joe Biden gave $8bn in assistance to Israel appeared on X last week and was viewed 400,000 times. Disinformation refers to the deliberate spread of false information, while misinformation is when someone unwittingly spreads or believes the false information to be true.Īnother video, originating from TikTok but now unavailable there, has racked up 2m views on X claiming to show high-profile Israeli generals captured by Hamas fighters. Since Hamas launched an attack on Israel on Saturday morning, X has been flooded with disinformation and misinformation that has heightened tensions across the globe. The user behind the X post that attracted 2m views later acknowledged the clip may have been used out of context.
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