I'm Brian Lairr on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. Disinformation on the Hamas attack

on Israel and Israel's responding war has been circulating virtually unchecked on online

social media platforms like X formerly known as Twitter. Here's what some of it looks like.

An image of Israeli warplanes bombing an orthodox church, the largest in Gaza apparently didn't happen.

A video of a young girl being let on fire by Hamas apparently didn't happen. A White House

announcement providing Israel with $8 billion in aid all falsely attributed or made up whole cloth

and yet garnering millions of impressions. And while we're now all used to this to some degree,

journalists, researchers and open source intelligence experts are sounding the alarm that this

is happening faster and at a greater scale than ever and perhaps with significant implications

during an intense time like this. Yesterday the European Union which recently put forth new

regulations under their Digital Services Act went so far as to issue Elon Musk owner of X obviously

a warning to regulate the disinformation on his platform and contact the relevant law enforcement

agencies within 24 hours. The Guardian reports that if Musk doesn't comply he could face a fine of

6% of his revenues from X or a total blackout in the EU. So fake information is filling people's

timelines and the risk is that it will obscure the evidence of the very real atrocities taking place

as well as bias people's politics. Joining us now to break down what's behind the droves of false

reports on the war and why the EU is giving Musk an ultimatum to curb it is wired reporter David

Gilbert one of his recent pieces is titled the Israel Hamas war is drowning X in disinformation.

David thanks for coming on welcome to WNIC. Thanks for having me, Brent.

Can you give us the lay of the land? I mean we've been talking about misinformation and disinformation

on the show and generally people in the media certainly since the 2016 election with all that

Russian backstaff that was going on in support of Trump. What's new today?

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