The online information war over fake content linked to Israel-Hamas conflict

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• Geoff Bennett:

  The Israel-Hamas war is nearing its third month, and, this week, Gaza's telecommunications company once again announced a communications blackout.

  But there is another front in this war, and it's taking place on our screens worldwide. Fake or mislabeled content linked to the war has been viewed online millions of times.

  To explore this issue, Amna spoke earlier with Shayan Sardarizadeh, a senior journalist with BBC monitoring's disinformation team, and Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow studying technology and foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Thank you to you both for joining us. We really appreciate it.

  Valerie, I want to start with you.

  You have looked at misinformation and disinformation coming out of other conflicts too. What is different about this work when it comes to this specific conflict?

• Valerie Wirtschafter, Brookings Institution:

  I think what's different here is that this is really, I think, an emotionally resonant conflict on both sides. And so we see that there is sort of this confirmation bias, this ability to kind of just discount confirming evidence.

  All of those things, I think, are really in play here.

• Amna Nawaz:

  And the reach, Valerie, just to follow up on that, on some of these videos is really frightening.

  Video that claimed to be Israeli forces shooting at Israelis at the music festival on October 7, that was seen 30 million times. There was the fake claims about a 5-month-old Palestinian baby who was killed in an airstrike that people were claiming was a doll. That went viral. It was published in the Israeli press.

  I mean, does the global interest in this war mean that that misinformation, disinformation gets spread even faster?

• Valerie Wirtschafter:

  I think shocking things, things that resonate, go viral.

  The boring stuff, the truth when we can get to the bottom of things, that's far less resonant, I think. And so when there are kind of claims being logged back and forth, they get amplified.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Shayan, you have the near-impossible job of trying to verify some of these videos, to debunk the disinformation that's out there and verify what you can.

  We have seen in this war too just images from other places, images from Syria, for example, being passed off as something that was unfolding in Gaza. How do you even begin to verify what's real and what's not?

• Shayan Sardarizadeh, BBC Verify:

  It's not an easy task because of the volume of content that is being posted and has been posted since this conflict began on the 7th of October.

  And, obviously, the nature of this conflict is a little bit different to, say, the conflict that we're seeing in Ukraine or, before that, the conflict in Syria. This is a conflict that's been going on for decades and decades and decades and decades.

  People have already sort of jumped into this with sort of their minds completely made up. And, already, they assume that they're in an information war and they have to win it at any cost, at any cost, even if it means denying that a 5-month-old Palestinian baby was actually a real baby, and not a doll, and his mother, who was just showing that baby to photographers in grief, was not faking it.

  Or that a 16-year-old Israeli teenager whose parents were killed in front of him in a kibbutz near the border with Gaza on the 7th of October is not a crisis actor and is not basically holding his laughter in front of cameras as he's giving an interview recounting how he saw his parents get killed in their house in front of his own eyes.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Valerie, how does the origin of some of this disinformation matter in this conflict?

  I'm thinking specifically of a video I know was widely covered. The Israel Defense Forces shared a list that was posted in a basement of a Gaza hospital. They said it was a list of Hamas members, a schedule for them guarding Israeli hostages. It was actually a calendar in which the days of the week were listed in Arabic.

  But that video was reported on widely by a number of other news organizations. It's coming through official channels. How does that change the nature of this information war?

• Valerie Wirtschafter:

  I think it creates sort of just an immediate ability to distrust any purveyor of information who is in the region, on the ground.

  Potentially, given the destruction and the violence in this conflict, there are so few people that are actually on the ground, those that are on the ground actually do have kind of a vested interest in the information space. And so we can see it with the IDF and the calendar example you mentioned trafficking in conspiracies or misleading information.

  Journalists who want to get into Gaza have to go with the IDF. That's maybe innocuous. Maybe it's just to review footage to make sure that identities aren't revealed or things like that, but it's immediately sort of ability to dismiss, given past — whether it's massaging the truth, completely fabricating things, or sort of seeding alternative narratives, it's immediately disqualifying as well.

  On the other side of the coin, of course, Hamas, I think, has long looked unfavorably on journalists. Why — from the Israeli perspective or from those who sort of are sympathetic with the Israeli cause, why believe them now?

  And so I think that that's a really huge challenge.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Valerie, what's the real-world impact of this kind of disinformation spreading as widely and as quickly as it does?

• Valerie Wirtschafter:

  Maybe an example is the best way to answer that question, is, looking at the kind of aftermath and ambiguity around the hospital bombing kind of earlier in the conflict, sort of there was a knee-jerk reaction to kind of cover this event.

  All the information wasn't known. Mainstream media outlets jumped on it, of course. Protests erupted, and then several diplomatic meetings were canceled as a result. In this conflict, conversation and those types of high-level communications are so important, but it wasn't allowed to move forward simply because protests and sort of the unwillingness of governance to engage after that event.

  And the challenge, of course, with that event is that it was very unclear what happened. There was not a lot of on-the-ground reporting at all at the time. And then, in the aftermath, more information was pieced together.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Shayan, I have said before this war is extremely online. And were it not for social media and a lot of online platforms, you have to think about what we wouldn't see when it comes to both the October 7 attacks and also what's been unfolding on the ground in Gaza.

  With people getting so much information and so much content, how do you advise them on what they should do, how they should view all of this in sorting out what's real from what's not?

• Shayan Sardarizadeh:

  Well, it is not easy. It's not an easy question for me. It's not an easy question for journalists, never mind the ordinary member of the public who just wants to go online and see what's going on.

  It's important to just, first of all, to be careful about the source. Who's saying this? How biased are they? What type of narrative are they pushing? Just have a look at their profile online. Again, they might have hundreds of thousands of followers, millions of followers, but are they actually pushing a certain narrative, a certain agenda?

  Or are they somebody who's genuinely or an outlet who's genuinely trying to tell the story of the conflict without putting any personal bias into it? See whether this video that has got 10 million views, has it been reported anywhere else? Has any of the journalists who are either in Israel or in Gaza mentioned this, referred to it?

  Try and follow people, actual journalists who are on the ground or actual people, witnesses, eyewitnesses who have reliably posted videos from what's happening on the ground on several occasions before this particular video. So, if you see something that is incredibly viral, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true. It also doesn't necessarily mean it's false.

  It just means, with a conflict like this, we all have to be careful. If you're not 100 percent, the best thing to do is just not share it.

• Amna Nawaz:

  I'm so grateful to both of you for the work you do to make sure the facts get out there.

  Shayan Sardarizadeh and Valerie Wirtschafter, thank you so much for your time.