Musk's X under fire as Israel-Palestine fight ignites online misinformation

The social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, has said it is trying to take action on a flood of posts sharing graphic media, violent speech and hateful conduct about the fight between Israel and Palestine's Hamas.

X said it's treating the crisis with its highest level of response, but outside watchdog groups say misinformation about the fight abounds on the platform that billionaire Elon Musk bought last year.

A post late on Monday from X’s safety team said: "In the past couple of days, we’ve seen an increase in daily active users on @X in the conflict area, plus there have been more than 50 million posts globally focusing on the weekend’s attack on Israel by Hamas. As the events continue to unfold rapidly, a cross-company leadership group has assessed this moment as a crisis requiring the highest level of response."

That includes continuing a policy frequently championed by Musk of letting users help rate what might be misinformation, which causes those posts to include a note of context but not disappear from the platform.

The struggle to identify reliable sources for news about the fight was exacerbated over the weekend by Musk, who on Sunday posted the names of two accounts he said were "good" for "following the war in real-time."

Analyst Emerson Brooking of the Atlantic Council called one of those accounts "absolutely poisonous."

Journalists and X users also pointed out that both accounts had previously shared a fake AI-generated image of an explosion at the Pentagon, and that one of them had posted numerous anti-Semitic comments in recent months.

Musk later deleted his post.

The EU's digital chief, Thierry Breton, warned Musk in a letter that his platform is spreading "illegal content and disinformation".

No trusted accounts

Brooking posted on X that Musk had enabled fake war reporting by abandoning the blue check verification system for trusted accounts and allowing anyone to buy a blue check.

Brooking said on Tuesday that it is "significantly harder to determine ground truth in this conflict as compared to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine" last year, and "Elon Musk bears personal responsibility for this."

He said Musk’s changes to the X platform have made it impossible to quickly assess the credibility of accounts, while his "introduction of view monetisation has created perverse incentives for war-focused accounts to post as many times as possible, even unverified rumours, and to make the most salacious claims possible."

"War is always a cauldron of tragedy and disinformation; Musk has made it worse," he added.

Further, Brooking said via email, "Musk has repeatedly and purposefully denigrated the idea of an objective media, and he made platform design decisions that undermine such reporting. We now see the result."

Part of Musk's drastic changes over the past year included gutting its staff, including many of the people responsible for moderating toxic content and harmful misinformation.

One former member of Twitter’s public policy team said the company is having a harder time taking action on posts that violate its policies because there aren’t enough people to do that work.

"The layoffs are undermining the capacity of Twitter’s trust and safety team, and associated teams like public policy, to provide needed support during a critical time of crisis," said Theodora Skeadas, one of the thousands of employees who lost their jobs in the months after Musk bought the company.

One-sided narrative?

X said it recently changed one policy over the weekend to enable people to more easily choose whether or not to see sensitive media without the company actually taking down those posts.

"X believes that, while difficult, it's in the public's interest to understand what's happening in real-time," its statement said.

"Plus, we've taken action to remove several hundred accounts attempting to manipulate trending topics."