From the outset of this weekend’s Israel-Hamas conflict, graphic footage of abductions and military operations have spread like wildfire on social media platforms, including X, formerly known as Twitter. But disinformation on the platform has made it harder for users to assess what’s going on in the region.
Over the weekend, X flagged several posts as misleading or false, including a video purportedly showing Israeli airstrikes against Hamas in Gaza. Thousands of users saw the posts, and the most widely shared posts were flagged as misleading by the platform. Still, dozens of posts with the same video and caption were not flagged by X’s system, according to CNBC’s review.
The patchwork enforcement comes days after NBC News reported that X made cuts to its disinformation and election integrity team. Shortly before Hamas launched its surprise attack, X removed headlines from links on the platform, making external links difficult to tell apart from standard photos shared on X.
Before Elon Musk acquired Twitter, the company’s management had devoted significant resources to fighting manipulated or misleading information. After Musk took over, renaming the platform, he slashed head count in teams dedicated to fighting misinformation and criticized the company’s past work with the U.S. government on Covid-19 disinformation.
Under Musk, X has prioritized user-driven content tagging with Community Notes, the preexisting feature formerly known as Birdwatch. But a September study from the EU found that despite the feature, which adds crowdsourced context to posts, disinformation was more discoverable on X than on any other social media platform and received more engagement than on other platforms, on a relative basis.
Alex Goldenberg, an analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute, studies hate and right-wing extremism on social media and in the real world. Goldenberg told CNBC that even before Musk’s tenure, Twitter had a challenging time handling non-English…
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