Researchers say changes to verification, safety policies make the site an unreliable source for news.
Palestinians evacuate the area following an Israeli airstrike on the Sousi mosque in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 9 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants’ surprise attack.
X, under Musk’s ownership since October 2022, has made changes to its content safety policies, with the consequences now glaringly apparent in this moment of geopolitical crisis, researchers said. Over the past year, the company loosened its platform’s rules, cut trust-and-safety employees after previously saying it would expand the team, reinstated once-banned accounts and allowed people to pay for a checkmark on the social network.
Earlier on Monday, X’s safety account posted another message suggesting the Community Notes feature will help users understand what they’re seeing. “When critical moments happen, people on X share their perspective in real time,” the company said in the post. “@CommunityNotes is a way for people on X to add context to posts, helping the others understand more about what they are seeing. We add new contributors regularly and just added more today.
As news of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began to emerge Saturday, a far-right political commentator published a post on X that claimed to show video evidence of Palestinian militants going door to door and killing Israeli citizens. “Imagine if this was happening in your neighborhood, to your family,” said the commentator, Ian Miles Cheong, who has frequently interacted with Musk on X.
Altogether, the posts received more than 604,100 views on the platform, NewsGuard said. It was also repeated in several posts on ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok where it spread unchecked, collecting at least 17,600 views, according to a Bloomberg review of the platform. It also spread on Telegram channels and QAnon forum posts, according to Bloomberg’s review.
The Taliban “have never staged any operations outside Afghanistan,” said Kugelman, who has studied Afghanistan and the Taliban since 2007. “Their ideology and operational strategies have always focused on Afghanistan, and Afghanistan alone.” He also pointed out that previous posts made by the account were uncharacteristically critical of Qatar, which the Taliban would never be.
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