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- cross-posted to:
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People who have turned to X for breaking news about the Israel-Hamas conflict are being hit with old videos, fake photos, and video game footage at a level researchers have never seen.
If you’re getting your information from facebook, twitter or fox news (to name a few top offenders) you’re in for a bad time.
And if a significant enough portion of the people are getting their information from those sources, we’re all in for a bad time.
More like: we’re all in for a bad time.
Unfortunately, their inability to discern fantasy from reality does not only affect them.
Sometimes, the fantasy is presented in a credible manner. That’s the hook.
I think another big issue is that there are a lot of news outlets that get their info from those three sources.
Let’s add Reddit to that list too.
When Bank of America announced 0% downpayment loans for people living in red lined communities with an abnormally low home value, Reddit was flooded with posts saying “BoA is giving better loans to black people” completely ignoring that the loans had no race qualifications. All it takes is one poorly summarized post and the whole site starts screaming nonsense.
Beyond that there are a lot of entities pushing their own narratives via bot farms and such, and it’s completely opaque to the users and mods who is upvoting content, or what’s being buried by powermods.
That’s not a fair assessment. A lot of news outlets get their info from social media like Twitter so, even if you’re not getting it directly from there, it’s very likely that you’re still getting information from there.
Hard enough to get unbiased reporting at the best of times.
Every media outlet picked sides on this a long time ago.