- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/6589988
The Israel-Hamas War Is Drowning X in Disinformation::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.
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The article seems like a hit piece for having to pay for Twitter. If it’s that important to use it, pay the money. Otherwise, like goes on just fine without the platform.
Disinformation about Israel is practically all anyone ever sees.
Consider that there are less than 16 million Jews in the world, and 475 million Arabs/ 2 million Muslims.
In this conflict that’s largely viewed as Jewish vs Arab or Jewish versus Muslim, Jewish voices are drowned out by either 30:1 or 125:1.
Israel is the only country in the region where lesbian Muslim woman can wear what she wants, vote, live in peace, and become an elected official.
But when you have 30:1 voices in the world making bullshit claims of apartheid, posting misleading infographics, and generally creating an atmosphere of overwhelming 1-sided sentiment it’s really easy to see why Israel is vilified.
Israel doing the longest military occupation in modern history isn’t bullshit.
Agreed. It would be pretty cool if the Palestinians would accept one of the many peace offers that have come their way.
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So censoring disinformation is bad because no one can know with 100% certainty that it’s actually disinformation or not? Isn’t there a lot of caveats here?
no one can know with 100% certainty that it’s actually disinformation
[Citation needed]
If video or pictures are being posted that weren’t shot in Israel/Gaza or have already been posted in the past, while posters imply that they are from the current conflict, then we can say with 100% certainty that this is disinformation.
I did suggest there are caveats to this premise. Your example doesn’t solve for a consumer of information being able to prove that it is disinformation in every case, and even the methods used to prove something is disinformation can potentially be flawed. I’m not arguing that disinformation doesn’t exist, because it clearly does. I’m saying that you can very rarely prove with 100% certainty that something is misinformation. Then you end up with who gets to deem what is and isn’t disinformation? These people and institutions are fallible to corruption and things can potentially be worse than they are already but this is debatable hence these discussions
In this case, if a video was first posted online in 2015, and is being shared as part of this conflict now, but with a Hamas logo added to the corner, we can use a search engine to say with absolute certainty that the video is misinformation.
Yes this seems like a solid case that no one anywhere could argue with. My only point is when the line starts to get fuzzy how do you decide? And is it worth having a total hands off approach at the cost of things like this so that when things get emotional and susceptible to bias that there’s always the full range of information at hand to be able to find the truth? I’m not really for or against btw and I lean towards being at least proactive about this obvious shit
I would prefer not to even get close to the fuzzy line. I think a little bit of misinformation is something society can handle, and we are experiencing a flood of very easily proven wrong misinfo.
I think the Twitter Added Context feature was a pretty elegant solution, and fit into the “this is wrong, even harmfully so, but I can’t prove its on purpose so maybe deleting it isn’t the right move.”
These are seriously issues that Lemmy is perfectly positioned to approach solving. Our community is eager to craft the perfect takes. We are so incredibly informed, and debate-ready. And the instances / communities / open source nature means we can literally make our own solutions to the ongoing problems of the net.
I hope you are right. It’s a problem and it needs some solutions. It appears equally as important to get it right and the only way I personally see that happening is by not having a knee jerk reaction to the problem and becoming properly informed and respectfully understanding where the other side is coming from before moving forward too brashly. It’s important to separate this side from trolls who are acting in bad faith. I would put Elon in half believing in it and half acting in bad faith because he is obviously half child. Not always a bad thing, it gives him the ability to be creative and adventurous but we all know sometimes children just want to smash the building down for reasons they don’t even understand.
The strongest point against censorship is that you don’t know what you don’t know, as in once the switch is flicked we no longer see what is being censored so once it’s out of sight the mechanisms that were put in place have to be air tight from corruption and unintentional bias.
This is so eloquently said. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Insisting that nothing can be falsified unless there is 100% certainty all the time is ridiculous. Who would even define what 100% certainty is supposed to be?
Because you come up some unattainable standard that you claim needs to be met, does not mean that anybody else has to agree with that standard.
You are free to believe in such nonsense, but otherwise it’s just sophistry.
I wonder if Lemmy has a better track record for misinfo than 2018 Twitter. Or even… Pre-2016 twitter. Gosh twitter has been shit for so long. Anyway. Do we have a news community that makes strides to be perfectly correct? I bet a lot of people would hate posting and commenting there lol.
I assume it’s a mixed bag: Some servers will remove it, others won’t and the worst of the worst will actively disseminate it.
Brb gonna make the Misinformation-Only instance. Well, actually disinformation is also welcome.
You mean lemmygrad?
Great idea, I can’t wait to post my theory of the earth being a 5th dimensional pyramidion over there.
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