How social media is inducing a fog of war surpassing previous clashes between Israel and Hamas, shaping the views of panicked citizens and a global public
The barrage of false images, memes, videos and posts — mostly generated from within the region itself — is making it difficult to assess what is real.
Washington PostElizabeth Dwoskin
Context & Ripple Effects
The conflict’s online information environment was already being strained by a surge of unverified visual material. Days later, reporting identified engagement-driven pseudo-OSINT accounts on X as a distinct source of misleading claims, while AI detectors also risked mislabeling authentic war photographs.
This matters because verification failures are not limited to outright fabrications: they can affect what citizens, journalists and global audiences accept as evidence during a fast-moving conflict.
First-order effects
People following the conflict face a higher burden to distinguish authentic material from false or contextless posts, delaying confidence in real-time accounts.
Platforms hosting the material become immediate gatekeepers of visibility and credibility, even when they cannot quickly verify every image, video or meme.
Second-order effects
Accounts rewarded for attention can gain influence by packaging uncertain claims as analysis, as the later reporting on pseudo-OSINT misinformation on X illustrates.
If conflict information continues to be produced and distributed faster than it can be authenticated, platform moderation and third-party verification will become more consequential parts of the information battlefield.
The durable risk is a synthetic-supply paradox: more purported evidence can leave audiences less able to establish a shared factual record, rather than better informed.
The trend: This is one instance of conflict-era information systems becoming a contested layer of warfare, where distribution incentives and verification tools both shape public understanding.
@USNatArchives ... The public statements of Members of Congress on a @verified accounts on a private platform are public records. Members of all political parties can & do make errors of fact or amplification, particularly in the fog of war, which merit correction & retraction. V…
Ilhan Omar has reposted an image purported to be from Gaza but is actually a 2013 image of child victims of the Assad regime's Eastern Ghouta gas attack. This is a sitting Congresswoman. I have absolutely no words. [image]
While technology can certainly help, the reality is that content moderation needs humans. “But over the last year, tech companies' abilities to field these complaints has been compromised by waves of layoffs in units responsible for policing content.” ⤵️ https://www.washingtonpos…
Thread: Online misinformation about the Israel-Hamas conflict - Day 8 This video, viewed 340,000 times, falsely claims to show Palestinians faking their inuries. It's taken from a 2017 @trtworld report on a makeup artist doing work for Palestinian films and charity projects. [ima…
In the Hamas-Israel conflict, much of the swirling misinformation is directed inward, a product of Israel's deep polarization. Hamas supporters are even resharing posts from Israeli far right influencers, taking advantage of the disunity. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
the viral image tweeted by Israel that a free AI detector says is “likely AI” is not AI. These “AI image detectors” are not very good. They are wrong often, are not clear about how they work, and are just as much a black box as AI image generators are https://www.404media.co/...
“When a black-box system that is at best 90 percent accurate suggests an image is 52 percent likely to be artificial, or 52 percent likely to be real, anyone can use that tool to make any argument they want.” #ethics #AI #disinformation
completely unproven AI image detectors are saying that photographs of war crimes are not real. this is not how you find out if an image is fake or not. you are not in CSI https://www.404media.co/...
New: AI detectors are discrediting the very real horrors of war. A popular AI detector says a photo of a baby corpse in Israel is AI generated. But a world leading expert says no evidence of AI generation. Calls it “second level” disinfo https://www.404media.co/... [image]