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How Misinformation Spreads through Conflict
Three experts break down how misinformation and propaganda spread through conflict and how to debunk it yourself.
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December 1, 2023
How Misinformation Spreads through Conflict
Three experts break down how misinformation and propaganda spread through conflict and how to debunk it yourself.
By Tulika Bose & Sophie Bushwick
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[Illustration of a Bohr atom model spinning around the words Science Quickly with various science and medicine related icons around the text]
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[CLIP: MSNBC NEWS: “Disinformation and Propaganda.”]
[INTRO MUSIC]
[CLIP: CNN NEWS: “Viral videos about this war that are having huge impact. But they’re completely fake. But they’re having dire consequences.”]
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[CLIP: NBC NEWS: “Dozens of accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter, spreading rather what’s believed to be coordinated posts with disinformation about the war.”]
Sophie Bushwick: When any major news event happens, a lot of us have the same impulse ...
Tulika Bose: We go to social media to follow the latest updates.
Bushwick: But that can sometimes backfire.
Tulika Bose: Right now we’re seeing viral misinformation everywhere—especially during the current Israel-Hamas conflict.
[CLIP:****MSNBC NEWS: “Spreading fast, influencing opinion and making it difficult for anyone who uses social media to decipher what’s really happening on the ground, in the Middle East.”]
Bose: So we asked the experts why this is happening and what you can do to avoid being taken in.
Bushwick: I’m Sophie Bushwick, tech editor at Scientific American.
Bose: I’m Tulika Bose, senior multimedia editor. And this is Science, Quickly.
[CLIP: Intro music]
Bushwick: On social media platforms, some footage and photos that have been attributed to the Israel-Hamas conflict are actually fake, or mislabeled or both.
Bose: Think video game footage passed off as a real missile attack from Israel or parachute jumpers in Egypt mischaracterized as a Hamas attack.
[CLIP: Sound from R3 video]
Bushwick: Fake content like this has been viewed millions of times.
Bose: Propaganda during wartime isn’t new. But online misinformation, spread by social media influencers, seems particularly bad around this conflict.
[Read more about the satellite tech revealing Gaza’s destruction]
Shayan Sardarizadeh: In terms of what I’m seeing, it’s definitely comparable and similar to what I was seeing in the first few weeks of the war in Ukraine, after Russia invaded invaded Ukraine. And by that, I mean most of the misinformation ... has been [from] ordinary people, regular users on the Internet, who are trying to do what is known as engagement farming.
Bose: That’s Shayan Sardarizadeh, who works on the BBC Verify team. His job is to take viral photos and videos about the conflict and investigate them. He’s found something really disturbing about all of this.
Sardarizadeh: It’s probably one of the worst examples of misinformation that you use the pain and suffering of people, genuine people, civilians on the ground while being impacted by this conflict, to basically farm engagement and build up your influence online. In some cases, I’ve seen TikTokers who are, you know, claiming to be, to be sharing live streams on the ground from either Israel or Gaza and, you know, the live stream has got two, three million viewers.
Bushwick: That’s because people are more likely to share something that makes them emotionally engaged ...
Bose: Even if those emotions are negative.
Sardarizadeh: And also, most of the time you’re posting stuff that is a bit shocking, a bit, sort of controversial, that it will get engagement. And then you will be able to build up your influence. You, you’ll gain followers and, you know—if you’re operating on [a] platform that basically pays your money for, for high engagement like YouTube, like TikTok, right, Twitter or X, as it’s known these days.
Bushwick: These incentives Shayan talks about are baked into social media. Platforms are designed to keep people on the site as long as possible. And as part of that, they reward individual accounts for earning engagement from other users. So that creates a motivation for unscrupulous influencers to post whatever will get them the most attention.
Bose: Sometimes those attention-getting posts make false accusations that real people are the ones making things up. In one example Shayan found, a far-right Indian influencer claimed that Palestinian refugees in a bombed refugee campwere actually so-called crisis actors.
Bushwick: He falsely stated they were staging their grief for the cameras.
Bose: Yeah. Shayan personally verified that the video in question featured a man who had lost three of his children.
Bushwick: Accusing people of being so-called crisis actors can also happen with mislabeled footage. For instance, Snopes debunked a video on TikTok that claimed to show an Israeli crisis actor pretending to be a recent victim of Hamas. The video does show an actor being positioned on the ground as if he’s injured, it’s completely unrelated to the current conflict—it’s from an April 2022 film shoot.
Bose: Shayan pointed out that a lot of these attention-grabbing accounts are falsely passing themselves off as journalists or open-source intelligence ...
Bushwick: Aka OSINT experts ...
Bose: Which distracts from the true citizen journalists and data analysts.
[CLIP: “Hello, everyone. This is Bisan from Gaza. More than 50,000 people to 60,000 people are evacuating to Al-Shifa Hospital and still evacuating every day. People are eating, sleeping, living here.”]
Sardarizadeh: Tons and tons of videos that, that news outlets have shared ... has come from people on the ground, either in Israel or Gaza, using their smartphones to record and document what’s going on.
[CLIP: Plestia: “They bombed really close to my house, that’s my window right now, that’s the view... (gasps)”]
Sardarizadeh: And then somebody or the other major newsroom, you know, somebody like me or my colleagues in my team ... has sat down, looked at that content, verified it and decided, okay, that’s good. We can use it as genuine content from Israel-Gaza.... And, you know, my work would have been, would have been impossible without that.
Bose: But here’s the thing: the combination of a lack of moderation on platforms, the rapid spread of misinformation during a conflict and the incentive of people to get more likes and views is creating this perfect storm. So, Sophie, you cover so much of this, especially in the tech space. What are your thoughts?
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