People who have turned to X for breaking news about the Israel-Hamas conflict are being hit with old videos, fake photos, and video game footage at a level researchers have never seen.
The 12 year old loser 4channers that thought (probably still think) saying the ‘n’ word is hilarious, turned into 25 year old fascists that think “nihilism” means “make life shitty for everyone else.”
Who are you talking about right now? Hexbear? Is your basis for who is a fascist just that they are rude to liberals on the internet and have intense feelings about capitalism and imperialism?
Or because they are aware of the conditions of life imposed in Palestine?
That 50% of the children in Gaza express no will to live? That 95% of the water is contaminated and Israel strictly controls the water supply? That thousands of civilians have been killed by the Israeli army since 2008? That Gaza functions as an open air concentration camp administrated by an openly racist apartheid state? That Israel helped fund and create Hamas in the 70s and 80s as a counterweight to the largely secular leftist PLO and this whole fucking situation is partially blowback from an effort to divide-and-conquer Palestine? That Hamas fucking chased the PLO out of Gaza, and now Hamas is essentially the only militant force left that can resist the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians?
Who else is there for Palestinians to root for? What the fuck are they supposed to do? Just sit in their squalid concentration camp and raise their depressed children to be unemployed adults with no future, in a crumbling city with no concrete to rebuild itself, because a rich nation on the other side of the fence deemed it so?
And in an overseas media environment where no one even fucking talks about any of this shit, and the attack is being treated as this sudden unprovoked thing out of left field, maybe some people are going to overcorrect in the other direction out of sheer frustration?
I’m well aware of conditions of life in Palestine. Perhaps if Hamas allowed elections in the last 20 years, there would be radically different relationships there.
Are you saying you agree with the Israeli government that Palestinians are a demographic threat?
Do you realize this is an explicitly bigoted sentiment? “Demographic threat” does not mean “some Palestinians are extremists.” It means “Palestinians must not be allowed to become too large a portion of Israel’s demographics.” The Israeli government criticizes Palestinians and Arabs in general for having too many children. This is rhetoric of religious and racial dilution. There are ~9 million Israelis, mainly Jewish, and ~5 million Palestinians, and Israelis do not want to dilute their society with them.
Israel has also non-consensually sterilized thousands of Ethiopian immigrant women, not informing them of the nature of the procedure.
When people call Israel an apartheid state there’s a reason for it
When people call Israel an apartheid state there’s a reason for it
Yeah those people are dumb, since Israeli Arabs have full citizenship. Same as any Israeli who opposes the integration - dumb people exist. They exist in the US too, as is easily observable by anyone who wants to limit immigration here.
Palestinians as a separate country are absolutely a threat and once made Israeli, we can look forward to prolonged peace in a generation or two.
End the ease of radicalization and the problem resolves.
This ain’t a secret at all and has nothing to do with the above. It was just a shitty idea since the PLO was considered the bigger threat - which was clearly wrong.
It’s a great timeline … 99% of the planet relies on megalomaniac morons, mega corporations, billionaires and for profit media corporations for all their information.
And we wonder why there is so much misinformation, disinformation, non information and covered up information everywhere.
It’s definitely the information age … expect no one said it would actually keep us informed or have any benefit to humanity.
It’s a great timeline … 99% of the planet relies on megalomaniac morons, mega corporations, billionaires and for profit media corporations for all their information.
A 100 years ago you got your morning paper that can give you a set of tainted views, because you had no chance to independently check, what is going on on the other side of the world. Now you got Fox news and others shoving down the propaganda narrative with a different set of “experts” 24/7.
Fair, but this article is talking about primary information from people who are actually there and small local news outlets being drowned out by misinformation. A lot of primary information in 2023 comes from social media which is then investigated and fact checked by larger and more reputable news outlets before being reported.
So yes, the average person who just wants to know what’s happening should not be getting that info from social media but reporters often have to. Changes to Twitter since musk took over (specifically paid blue check marks and the removal of titles from links) have made the process of sifting through the misinformation and disinformation exponentially harder, even for people who do it for a living like the researcher in the article.
When Bank of America announced 0% downpayment loans for people living in red lined communities with an abnormally low home value, Reddit was flooded with posts saying “BoA is giving better loans to black people” completely ignoring that the loans had no race qualifications. All it takes is one poorly summarized post and the whole site starts screaming nonsense.
Beyond that there are a lot of entities pushing their own narratives via bot farms and such, and it’s completely opaque to the users and mods who is upvoting content, or what’s being buried by powermods.
That’s not a fair assessment. A lot of news outlets get their info from social media like Twitter so, even if you’re not getting it directly from there, it’s very likely that you’re still getting information from there.
There are some good sources on YouTube like Crash Course. The problem is when people get their information from posts or channels that are not peer reviewed.
I didn’t mean that there isn’t any good information on social media. I have spent a bunch of time watching video lectures that MITOpenCourseWare has posted on youtube.
Using social media sites as a news aggregator is like looking at the news through a filter. I think that is bad because you don’t know how the filter works and you don’t control the filter.
Yeah, it was very useful at getting hot takes, misinformation, sensationalist and outsourced soundbites. It still useful for that, but now there is more unchecked nazism.
There are a ton of videos floating around that ARE credible. They simply aren’t getting reported on in a meaningful way. If they do get mentioned, it’s often in an extremely watered down manner that almost feels intentionally misleading.
You also have videos that are 100 percent verifiable (or the protest videos) that are only being reported on by a few organizations, often leaving out important context.
If the mainstream media refuses to truly engage in the situation, then people will turn to dubious sources.
I mean, that’s just the other side of the same coin. They need good info to dig through, and they need to actually dig. Both are required for actual journalism, and both don’t work under capitalism. There’s too much money in lies, and it’s expensive to fight them in the first place.
It was the social media of choice for journalists. It was an excellent place to get your news as long as you followed the right people (reputable, credible professionals).
Now many of those right people have left and they’re far more difficult to distinguish from the wrong people.
I disagree with the headline, the war is not causing disinformation. Its bad faith users posting disinformation and ~~X’s ~~ (nope still calling it Twitter) policies that not only let it happen but encourage it.
Imagine not being at all media-savvy and buying into it. MAGA types are idiot shitheads who are completely driven by their emotions. There’s no higher function.
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