A cesspool, a mess, chaos. There are no words to describe the discord
Read the decryption: Israel-Hamas War: The fake images and videos circulating since October 7th
To the picture by Donald Trump’s son, which broadcast to its 10.5 million subscribers a bloody video that purported to come from Israel, even though it had been circulating since 2015. Donald Trump Jr.’s message was not moderated. What’s even more embarrassing is that the blue sticker, which before the Musk era meant it was a certified source and now just indicates that the user paid for it, was previously even applied by messaging algorithms. This is just one example among many. “For many reasons, this is the worst crisis I have had to cover here.” complained, Sunday, October 8thJustin Peden, American investigative and online verification journalist (Open Source Intelligence).
The developments related to the war in Ukraine are obvious. In February 2022, as Russian troops pushed toward the Ukrainian border, many reports were published by meticulous observers using open access sources, be they professional (like the Bellingcat media) or amateur (like the Little Think Tank collective). Their audience had increased tenfold as they established themselves as valuable secondary sources for tracking the conflict, despite the belligerents’ misinformation. And this despite failures, such as the accidental temporary suspension of some of them or the inexhaustible competition from the Kremlin’s propaganda squadrons.
“Community notes” as insurance
Twenty months later, the landscape has changed dramatically. Meanwhile, Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 and each of his decisions has weakened an already precarious information balance. One of his first decisions was to overthrow the information hierarchy. No more highlighting certified accounts – celebrities, media, states, journalists who are supposed to be responsible for their word. The revolution of “blue” accounts, a subscription that ensures greater visibility, now sees the algorithm promoting accounts based on the search for an audience or influence, with their cohort of sensationalist, misleading and hateful posts, like this by Donald Trump Jr.
Also read: On Twitter, the end of “certified accounts” begins with confusion
At the same time, the platform has cut its staff and is now clinging to “community notes,” replies intended to provide context to an erroneous tweet, to moderate debates. But the number of participants does not always compensate for amateurism, as some context notes themselves are poorly sourced or incorrect. If they exist. X congratulated that 500 of them have been written since October 7th. However, they are not enough to capture the amount of misleading content. According to an NBC News count, only 8% of the 120 posts repeating the rumor that Joe Biden voted for $8 million in aid to Israel contained corrective text.
Read the report: Article reserved for our Twitter subscribers “Community Notes”: A week in the role of an “arbiter of truth”
In early October, Elon Musk also approved a user interface change that prevents the title of press articles shared in messaging from being displayed. The logic is economic – given the ongoing exodus of active users, the Tesla boss is trying to make the bridges to the rest of the web less visible. However, the impact on the accuracy of the information is catastrophic: the verification articles published online on the old Twitter no longer appear in the form of a simple photo without text and thus lose their corrective character, let alone when clicked on. Taken together, these measures have created the perfect ecosystem in which hyped, rushed and manipulative content can thrive.
Churn of active users
To make matters worse, the disinformation comes from the highest levels of X. Officially, Elon Musk does not defend this. “As always, try to stay as close to the truth as possible, even when it comes to things you don’t like.” he asked on the first day of the Israeli response. But the multi-billionaire himself promoted manipulative accounts. “For tracking the war in real time, @WarMonitors and @sentdefender are good,” he tweeted on October 8, before deleting his message. The first shares anti-Zionist and conspiratorial messages – for example, he believes in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a famous anti-Masonic and anti-Semitic forgery from the early 20th century. The second bombards its hundreds of thousands of subscribers with short, unsubstantiated claims.
Given the flood of rumors, journalists and observers are now unofficially taking on the role of moderation, which Elon Musk never appreciated and which he can no longer afford. For internet users who want to protect themselves from misleading content, the smartest decision today seems to be simply leaving the platform, as Slate recommends. That’s what many climatologists did over the summer, exhausted by the stories of climate skeptics.
Read the survey: Article reserved for our subscribers. Climate: Scientists, army’s first targets of doubts about global warming
Every day the number of defectors from X to BlueSky, an alternative created by Twitter veterans, increases a little more. In September, the platform bought by the Tesla boss fell below 400 million active users, its lowest level in a decade, a far cry from Facebook’s three billion. At the beginning of October, according to official figures from X, there were only 245 million.