2023-10-12 02:06:00
From Panama, young Israelis travel to enlist in the army and confront Hamas.
Photo: Embassy of Israel in Panama – Embassy of Israel in Panama
In Israel’s war once morest Hamas in Gaza, social media has not been neutral. With accounts from fake journalists, media outlets with dubious track records, and images that feed wrong narratives, these platforms have demonstrated, once once more, that they are incapable of containing a tsunami of misinformation around a critical moment for humanity. The relaxation of content moderation policies is generating more and more debates.
The account of the Israeli Embassy in Panama on X, formerly Twitter, published a photo on Tuesday showing a group of young Israelis who were traveling to enlist in the Army to fight once morest Hamas. The publication was immediately bombarded by comments accusing the diplomatic mission of lying and using artificial intelligence to create the image.
The post was flagged with a pinned comment from a user who claimed to have used a digital verification tool to prove that the photo had been generated by artificial intelligence. And one more comment, from a different account, pointed out abnormal details in the posing people, such as deformed fingers and faces. It was real?
The Israeli ambassador to Panama, Itai Bardov, came out to clarify that the photo was legitimate. “The photo is real and was taken on October 9 at 7:24 pm at the Tocumen airport in Panama. “We want to thank the hundreds of thousands of Israelis in Latin America for rushing back to Israel to defend their citizens and fight the Hamas Terrorists,” he said. In addition, he added two photos from other angles, in which you can see that the scene was real. By testing it in a verification tool, we were able to verify that it was legitimate.
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“If we weren’t in an emergency it would make me laugh,” said Bardov.
Israel has used artificial intelligence in this war. It has done so in the defense area, to feed its information systems and its military operations with models such as Fire Factory. This allows huge amounts of data to be processed for targeting for air strikes. It has also used artificial intelligence to identify dead people in the country’s hospitals. But he hasn’t used this intelligence to edit this photo, at least.
The comment on the aforementioned publication has not been removed, even if the image has proven to be legitimate. If the photo appears with certain details that make it look like it was artificially generated, it is because of the quality of the phone with which it was taken. This is just one example of many of how dangerous social media is right now.
While major world events often trigger an avalanche of falsehoods, researchers say the scale and speed with which online disinformation proliferated following the weekend attack on Israel by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas had not been seen before. Never before.
The conflict, they add, offers a grim case study in the diminished ability of prominent platforms like Facebook, owned by Meta, and X, formerly Twitter, to combat false information in a climate of layoffs and cost cuts that have destroyed teams. of trust and security.
To compound the problem, a series of controversial measures have been taken on , encourages participation rather than precision. This is the case of this picture.
Experts fear that these measures have increased the risk of disinformation causing real-world harm, amplifying hate and violence, especially in a rapidly evolving crisis scenario.
In X “the changes have completely destroyed what was once one of its greatest strengths: monitoring breaking news and helping users separate fact from fiction.”
Alessandro Accorsi, senior analyst at the Crisis Group, said that “the enormous amount of fake and old videos and images of attacks circulating (on the Internet) is making it difficult to understand what is happening” in Israel and Gaza. And it makes work difficult for the press.
“While there are still countless talented journalists and researchers who continue to use X to help the public better understand what is going on, the signal-to-noise ratio has become intolerable,” said DFRLab’s Carvin. “Its usefulness as a reliable research and information tool is fundamentally broken and may never be recovered,” he added.
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Hamas: social networks to spread terror
And while misinformation abounds and prevents understanding of what happened, Hamas uses the networks to sow terror. The murder of an elderly woman spread on Facebook, armed fighters announcing by telephone to Israelis the death of their loved ones, humiliating videos of hostages in Gaza, are examples of the massive Hamas propaganda that seeks to paralyze Israel using terror, according to the experts.
On Saturday, Mor Bayder said that she did not receive the usual message from her grandmother: “Mori, my love, are you awake?” Instead, the young Israeli said that she discovered on social media “brutal” images of the murder of her grandmother, during the offensive launched by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in a village bordering the Gaza Strip.
“A terrorist broke into her house, murdered her, took her phone, photographed the horror and posted it on her Facebook wall. This is how we found out,” she detailed in a chilling testimony published on the social network that was shared by several members of her family.
On the Israeli television channel Channel 13, Mor Bayder cried that the murderer called her aunt to force her to see the images of the old woman “lying in a bloodbath” in her home in Nir Oz, a kibbutz located two kilometers away. from the Gaza Strip, where several Israelis are missing since the Hamas attack.
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Since Saturday, Hamas has spread numerous acts of violence through photos and videos.
“It is intentional: the objective is to generate a feeling of helplessness, paralysis and humiliation,” explains Michael Horowitz, security analyst for the consulting firm Le Beck International.
In a video that has gone viral, a naked young woman appears, apparently unconscious, in the back of a truck amid the screams of armed men.
Her mother identified her as Shani Louk, a young Israeli and German woman in her 20s who was participating in the rave party that turned into a massacre in the desert on Saturday. According to an Israeli NGO, Hamas massacred regarding 250 participants there.
Other images of a family lying on the ground went around the world. A six or seven year old boy cries and refuses to believe that his sister has died.
He asks his mother if she is going to come back and she answers: “No” and throws herself on her son to protect him just at the moment when the legs that appear to be those of a kidnapper pass in front of the camera.
These propaganda methods are not new to Hamas, notes researcher Ruslan Trad of the Atlantic Council’s digital analysis laboratory (DFRLab). But they are “much more sophisticated,” and “unprecedented on this scale” due to the large number of Israeli victims, something equally unprecedented.
These stories also find a strong echo because they are “systematically transmitted by Iranian and Russian trolls – people with an unknown identity who publish provocative messages – and amplified by state media,” added David Colon, professor at Sciences Po Paris.
Added to this, according to him, is “China’s ambiguous attitude towards platforms like TikTok, which misses a lot of shocking content.” As for .
“Hamas and the Palestinian media, whether associated or not, provide evidence of war crimes,” said Michael Horowitz, referring to this Islamist movement that was already classified as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union following a series of suicide attacks in the 1990s and 2000s.
“Hamas and its allies do not fear being accused of having committed war crimes and massacres; “They consider global institutions to be useless and supported by the West,” he stressed.
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