How Elon Musk's X Failed During the Israel-Hamas Conflict
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This week, Bloomberg reported that social media posts about the Israel-Hamas conflict have led to a sticky cesspool of confusion and conflict on Elon Musk\\u2019s X, formerly known as Twitter.\\xa0On Saturday, just hours after Hamas fighters from Gaza surged into Israel, unverified photos and videos of missile air strikes, buildings and homes being destroyed and other posts depicting military violence \\u2014 in Israel and Gaza \\u2014 crowded the platform. But some of the horror, not all of course, were old images passed off as new.\\xa0Some of this content was posted by anonymous accounts that carried blue checkmarks, which signals that they had purchased verification under X\\u2019s \\u201cpremium\\u201d subscription service. Some military footage circulating on X were drawn from video games, and some of the lies were, as usual, pushed by far-right pundits on the platform, for clicks or, possibly, ulterior motives. For the midweek podcast, Brooke\\xa0speaks with Avi Asher-Schapiro, who covers tech for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, about how Musk\'s policy changes at X have led to a stronger initial surge of misinformation than usual during this conflict, and how an algorithmically-driven "fog of war" impacts\\xa0our historical record of this conflict.\\xa0
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