This is on the Media's Midweek Podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, Bloomberg reported

that social media posts about Israel and Hamas have led to a sticky cesspool of confusion

and conflict on Elon Musk's ex. On Saturday, just hours after Hamas fighters from Gaza

surged into Israel, unverified photos and videos of missile airstrikes, buildings, and homes

being destroyed, and other posts depicting military violence in Israel and Gaza crowded

the platform. But some of the horror was actually old images passed off as new.

Social media, we've also spotted many fake video circulating on a line in particular

claiming to show a children captured by Hamas, especially this appalling video that's

been circulating and seen two million times on this post only on ex.

Some of this content was posted by anonymous accounts that carried blue check marks, signaling

that they had purchased verification under ex's premium subscription service. Some military

footage circulating on ex was drawn from video games. On Sunday, Elon Musk recommended

to his 159 million followers to accounts for, quote, following the war in real time.

These same accounts have made false claims or anti-submitted comments in the past.

Avi Asher Shapiro covers tech for the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Welcome back to the show,

Avi.

Thanks for having me, Brooke.

So on Tuesday, the European Union industry chief Kierri Breton told Elon Musk that he

needed to tackle the spread of disinformation on ex to comply with new EU online content

rules. Didn't Musk take some stuff down afterwards?

I'm not sure about that. I've been looking at ex for the last week or so to see how easy

it is to find something that's just completely made up about what's going on in Israel and

...