Chaos surrounds the explosion of a Gaza hospital

The Al Ahli Arab Hospital Shooting: What Happened in Gaza and How Israel and the Palestinians Respond to Misinformation in the 21st Century

There is a full picture of what happened at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. The blast killed hundreds of people, who were reportedly hiding from bombardment elsewhere.

Immediately after the news, counterclaims flew about who was responsible. Many initial news stories reported it as an Israeli airstrike, citing the Palestinian health ministry. Israel denied the accusation and said it was caused by a misfired rocket launched by a Palestinian militant group. The US supported Israel’s claim based on its own analysis of open source information and overhead imagery.

A majority of independent analysts do not think that the damage is consistent with a standard Israeli airstrike.

In the wake of the tragedy, the shifting accounts in news outlets made it difficult to establish accountability, and the rapid spread on social media of old videos and bogus eyewitness accounts made it even harder to know who was responsible.

Many people were already thinking about Israel or the Palestinians as the likely culprits of the carnage, even before the full evidence was available. Protests broke out across the Middle East and a planned summit between President Joe Biden and Palestinian, Egyptian, and Jordanian leaders was canceled.

The impact of a flood of misinformation is having a material affect on the diplomacy around the conflict, with some of which have the ability to lead to violence. “It’s hard to argue misinformation isn’t a central story here, and a really consequential one.”

Another much-viewed video claiming to show the hospital blast was first posted in 2022, in what’s become a common tactic of recycling and misrepresenting conflict footage.

“In the time between something happening and us having a really good assessment of what happened, there are a lot of people who will seek to use this situation — if they can make you believe something about it — that is absolutely to their benefit,” said E. Rosalie Li, a researcher and founder of the Information Epidemiology Lab.

Changes made by Musk have made it more difficult to identify credible sources and have made posts that are accurate more engaging.

On Tuesday, an X account purporting to be a journalist at Al Jazeera claimed to have seen eyewitness evidence that the hospital was hit by a Hamas rocket. Al Jazeera said it had no journalist by that name. A quick perusal of the account’s posts showed that until very recently it had been posting about Indian politics and trolling Pakistan’s cricket team.

The account gained a lot of followers before it was taken down, as well as being shared by other large accounts including a conservatives in the U.S.

NewsGuard criticized X for giving out blue check verifications to people who paid $8 per month. Before Elon Musk purchased Twitter, those same blue checks were useful in reliably identifying the likes of celebrities, politicians, and journalists. Premium users who receive a blue Badge are boosted by the platform, according to NewsGuard. “While the exact details of how X boosts and downranks (lowering a post’s position in users’ feeds) is undisclosed and therefore unclear, NewsGuard’s analysis suggests that the boost is significant, if not crucial, to claims going viral.” Legacy verified accounts that refuse to pay for premium subscriptions are being removed from the service.

“The way that the platform has been shifted just rewards, encourages, incentivizes and amplifies the bulls***,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

The 250 posts analyzed within the study promoted one of 10 false or unsubstantiated war narratives identified by NewsGuard, including claims that CNN had staged footage of its news crew under attack in Israel, and videos claiming to show Israeli or Palestinian children in cages. In one week, the 250 posts collectively received over 1 million engagements and were viewed more than 100 million times. The top 250 posts were posted by verified X accounts.

According to the study by NewsGuard, most of the misinformation posted on X is being pushed by verified users. After analyzing the 250 most-engaged X posts between October 7th and October 14th that promoted incorrect or unverified information relating to the war, researchers at NewsGuard found that verified X accounts were behind 74 percent of it.

How Community Notes Against the Hamas Attack on Israel Fails to Correct and Identify Misinformation after the September 11th NBC News Observation

“We want answers right away. She said sometimes they don’t have answers right away. If you can’t take the slow, methodical work that usually requires in an open source investigation, it could have really dangerous repercussions.

It’s still possible for accounts on X to quickly push out definitive takes that later turn out to be incorrect.

“Right now [X] is an absolute misinformation and disinformation crisis, and that environment is uniquely unhelpful to getting to a shared understanding of what happened and trying to make sure there’s accountability around what looks like a pretty clear disaster,” Scott-Railton said.

In recent weeks, Musk has promoted X as a platform for citizen journalist, and praised its Community Notes feature for improving the accuracy of information. NewsGuard found that just a small number of the posts were flagged for misinformation because of the Community Notes feature. Less than 70 percent of the time, Community Notes failed to correct or identify misinformation. NewsGuard’s findings echo an NBC News report from October 10th that showed how volunteers behind the community fact-checking feature struggled to keep up with the flood of misinformation that followed the Hamas attack on Israel, causing notes to take hours or days to approve and some posts not getting labeled at all.

Solar Keys: Podcasts and RSS Feeds for GadgetLab and a Heart That Works Book by David Gilbert, Lauren Goode, and David Gilbert

The book A Heart That Works is recommended by David. Mike recommends Bono’s memoir Surrender. Lauren would like you to send her workout playlists. (She prefers Spotify.)

David Gilbert can be found on social media @daithaigilbert. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Solar Keys is our theme music.

You can always listen to the show through the audio player, but if you want to get all of it for free, you have to subscribe.

If you have an iPad, open the Podcasts app and click on the link. Overcast, Pocket Casts and other apps can be downloaded, as can searching for Gadget Lab. If you are on the computer, you can find us in the app by tapping here. We are on other services as well. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.