The Israel-Hamas War Instantly Broke X
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2023
⏱️ 36 minutes
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Summary
When the Arab Spring was unfolding, Twitter was hailed as a way for on-the-ground reporting to reach the public. But when fighting between Hamas and Israel broke out over the weekend, X became flooded with misinformation.
Guest: Casey Newton, founder and editor of the technology newsletter Platformer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, TBD listeners. Before we start the show, I want to let you know about a story |
| 0:05.2 | coming up a little later. It's from one of our partners, SAP. Is your business reaching |
| 0:10.8 | an exciting turning point? Are you ready to seize the moment for growth? When you're |
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| 0:20.9 | more, head to SAP.com slash be ready. And stick around to hear how Ember Technologies |
| 0:27.3 | seized the moment. |
| 0:41.4 | That sound you're hearing, a helicopter and a grenade being launched, is from a video |
| 0:47.0 | that was posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, earlier this week. It was posted with |
| 0:52.7 | a caption, new video, Hamas fighters shooting down Israel war helicopter in Gaza. It's been |
| 0:59.7 | viewed more than 2.5 million times, reposted more than 2,500 times, except it's totally |
| 1:07.7 | fake. It's from a video game called Armour 3. It's not in Gaza, it's not in Israel, nothing |
| 1:14.6 | about it has anything to do with the current conflict. |
| 1:18.8 | The video now has a community note attached explaining this, but not before it bounced |
| 1:25.9 | all around the internet. Other videos, horrifying real ones from Israel and Gaza are all over |
| 1:33.5 | X, with little or no warning. It makes the platform a place people used to go for news |
| 1:40.2 | into this ghastly brew of suffering and confusion over what's real, what's not, and what's |
| 1:47.3 | being posted just for clicks. I wanted to understand how it got this bad. So I called up journalist |
| 1:54.7 | Casey Newton who writes the newsletter platform. Casey says there are three big reasons. |
| 2:01.9 | One is that since he took over the platform, Elon Musk has systematically gotten rid of |
| 2:08.0 | the vast majority of the people whose job it used to be to prevent false things from |
| 2:14.2 | going viral on the platform. Another reason is that Musk has repeatedly endorsed accounts |
| 2:22.5 | that are known spreaders of misinformation. And a third reason is that after eliminating |
... |
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