Today, Explained - Hearts, minds, and likes

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

False information about what is happening in Israel and Gaza is taking over social media faster than journalists like BBC Verify’s Shayan Sardarizadeh can check it. That’s exactly how digital propagandists want it, says professor and social media expert Marc Owen Jones. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn and Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Haleema Shah, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Israel barraged Gaza with airstrikes today. Meanwhile, three aid convoys carrying food, water and medication entered Gaza through its border with Egypt. The Biden administration is urging Israel to delay a ground invasion. It wants more aid to enter Gaza and more time for Hamas to free the hostages it's holding. OK, that is the news on the war. All of that is true, verified, fact-checked.

Thank you, Laura. But so much else here is not. Why this war became a haze of misinformation. Most of the content that has come from this war hasn't been necessarily by professional journalists with a camera person recording. It's been actual ordinary people with their smartphones just taking videos of what's going on and putting it online. And then obviously that needs to be verified. Coming up on Today Explained. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long.

From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk, an authorized gaming partner of the NBA.

BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario.

It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. So a lot of stuff circulating about this war is not real. What to do about that? Enter Cheyenne Sardarzadeh. He's a BBC journalist and he's part of a team of journalists at BBC who look for and flag misleading or fake content that's gone viral. I asked Cheyenne first to just define misinformation. So, I mean, the technical definition that most people who do this job seem to stick to is that misinformation is mostly content that is shared online, which is false, but there's no malicious intent behind it.

But this information, you know, it takes it a notch above that. That's when, you know, somebody is putting content out that is misleading and false because they think there'll be something, there'll be some gain for them from it. Okay, so misinformation is mistakenly put out, disinformation is deliberate. During this war, for the past two weeks, what sorts of things, what sorts of misinformation and disinformation are you seeing being spread? I have seen, I think it reminds me of the first few days, first few weeks actually, of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Very similar.

We have had in the first two weeks of this war a torrent of misinformation online. You know, videos being shared and posted, viewed by tens of millions of people that have had nothing to do with the war. I have seen videos from past Israel Hamas conflicts. This video of an attack by Israeli forces on Gaza is in fact that what it purports to be, but it's from May, not from this current set of attacks. From the war in Syria, from the Ukraine war, from some of the uprisings in the Middle East, I've seen content from football celebrations.

I've seen video game footage. Take this video saying Hamas militants started a new airstrike on Israel. You see that? That is actually from a video game. That's not even real. You see the exact same video posted to YouTube here. I've seen military exercise videos on YouTube

that have been shared on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, and have been viewed millions and millions of times. This video allegedly shows dozens of Hamas fighters paragliding into Israel. Through a reverse image search, we were able to geolocate the area. The white building in the background is a military academy in Cairo. And it's not just videos, by the way. Same thing with images. And in some cases, same thing with posts that do not contain any video or image, but

make a very incendiary claim during the Fogel war that shocks people. And then it turns out it's completely unsourced. There's no evidence for it. You know, it's somebody's War that shocks people. And then it turns out it's completely unsourced. There's no evidence for it. You know, it's somebody's just made it up. And then we get into, you know, people who, you know, for whatever reason, create fake accounts, say, you know, fake IDF account or fake Hamas account or fake account from an Israeli politician and try to get engagement off of it. So I've seen all of those and some more. I want to understand how your job works in real time. Can you walk me through the process of checking one of these claims that you've discovered is misinformation?

Yeah, sure. I'll give you two. One misinformation, one disinformation. So obviously we know the way this particular conflict started was that on the Saturday, 7th of October, Hamas militants infiltrated Israel and killed something between 1,200 to 1,300 Israeli citizens. And we know that some Israeli citizens were taken hostage during that attack that was unleashed on Israel. So a rumor began on the Sunday morning that some senior Israeli generals had been taken hostage by Hamas militants. And then a video came out in the

afternoon, our time in the UK, that got millions and millions of views online. It was on X, it was on Facebook, I saw it on Instagram, I saw it on TikTok. It's a 30-second video, and in it you see a big black van, and then you see several men wearing military uniforms who look like security agents and balaclavas, with three men being escorted by security agents. And the caption on the video said, several high-profile Israeli generals captured by Hamas fighters. Quote, unquote, That's what it said.

So when I saw that, I was like, okay, we have reporters on the ground. They're not telling us anything like it. They've contacted the IDF. They're not saying any of the generals have been taken hostage. So let's properly check this. And if you check the video, there's a moment in the video that one of the security agents wearing a military uniform has the logo DTX on there and I just searched for DTX and you know lo and behold DTX is the state security service of Azerbaijan so then I thought okay this video must have been shared at some point somewhere of the Azerbaijan security service arresting some people. So I went on YouTube, went on Instagram, went on TikTok and started putting search terms, you know, using Google Translate in the local language, in Azerbaijani language, looking

for that video. And I found a video uploaded on the 5th of October on YouTube by the official account of the Azerbaijani state security service with, you know, a verified YouTube channel. That was the longer version of that video and of higher resolution. So somebody had basically taken like a 30 second clip of that video and all the captions were in there. And it made it perfectly clear that it was the state security of Azerbaijan arresting Karabakh separatist leaders. Then I searched online to see whether any Azerbaijani news sources had reported this happening on the 5th of October,

and I found several. So that was it. To me then, at that point, it was clear this video is false. It has got nothing to do with the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Those are not Israeli generals. This video was taken in Azerbaijan and is related to the dispute there between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The first instance of that video being shared was on the platform Telegram, which is a messaging app, which is really, really popular in some parts of the world, maybe not necessarily in America. So it was initially shared there, wasn't very viral. Then some people who have big followings on platforms like, you know, Twitter or Instagram or TikTok had basically seen that video and they posted it to their accounts. And that's how it took off and became really big. That sounds like disinformation to me. That sounds deliberate to me. You said it's

misinformation. What do you think? I would categorize that as misinformation because I think most of the people who shared it had no idea what it was. If I wanted to give you an example of disinformation that I've seen in the last two weeks, we saw a video shared online that it looked like, it was like a minute and a half, and it looked like a BBC News video. So somebody had gone through the effort to copy our branding and Starland logo in a very convincing way. And the content of the video said that BBC News was reporting that the Hamas militants who infiltrated Israel and killed Israeli citizens had got their weapons from Ukraine. Now, this wasn't something that we had reported at all. This wasn't a video we'd created. It was 100% fake. Ukraine has got nothing to do with this conflict. And then lo and behold,

the day after that, Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia, posted online, putting out exactly that same narrative, that Hamas militants were using the weapons given to Ukraine by Western powers. So you have to wonder why anybody would go through the effort of producing a fake BBC video to say the government of Ukraine is actually in cahoots with Hamas. What tends to be the motive of people who spread mis- and disinformation? Misinformation most of the time comes from people who are doing what is known as engagement farming. And on platforms like, say, TikTok or YouTube or Twitter, they can make significant sums of money off of it if they get massive engagement. One of the examples I saw was on TikTok, somebody was claiming that they were running live streams of the conflict from the ground in Israel.

And they had something like two, three million people who were watching their live stream. The footage was actually from a military exercise from five years ago, but people were watching it and he was making money off of it. Social media platforms, their algorithms are designed to make content that is shocking. The algorithms want that type of content,

want us to see that type of content. That type of content goes viral, regardless of whether it's true or not. So that's one incentive. But then with the example I just gave you, and I can give you several more, either somebody is trying to shape the opinion of a group of people or a group of nations, some politicians, some influential people about what is going on, which is politically in their favor, or somebody has an actual economic interest mixed with politics in what is going on, which is politically in their favor, or somebody has an actual economic interest mixed with politics in what's going on and they're doing this because they will have something to gain from it. How many people see the work that you do

versus the thing that you end up debunking? Look, that's the age-old problem of people who work in this field. But even if you had a fact check on a piece that had 10 million views and yours got 2,000, 3,000, even if you manage to change one mind, one person who saw the original post sees your fact check and is convinced, okay, that was false, I don't believe it anymore. I think any fact checker, any misinformation reporter can take pleasure in that and go, okay, I did something good. I hear you. I really do. I hear you making sense of this, and yet everything that you've just told me makes me a bit frightened and a bit depressed. When you think about the tide of misinformation, just this tide of bull crap, and you're like a lone soldier at your keyboard,

how do you sort of get through the day without becoming very overwhelmed and very depressed? Look, I'm an optimistic person. I still think the vast majority of people have common sense, are good people, and want to get factual information. And I still think most people still believe in such a thing as a shared truth. I do. So I think it's just a case of, you know, us working harder, people like me working harder, spending more time, hopefully, and then spreading this ability, this knowledge. You know, one of the things that I do constantly, and I take pure joy from it, is I try to,

you know, on social media, on, say, X, I try to, you know, on social media, on say X, I try to do threads, like media literacy threads. And I try to tell people, see, this is the process I follow to check a video, to verify a video. This is the process I follow to verify an image. Step by step, simple.

Many of the stuff that goes viral online that is false or misleading would take minutes to check, sometimes seconds, honestly. The other thing is, social media is not a friend of sourcing. Always good to look for sources on social media, always good to know. I think most people know this, but that's the power of social media, that just because something is viral doesn't mean it's true. And then the most important thing that is something I always say to people, just to be skeptical. Everything that I'm seeing, I have to check for myself.

Doesn't mean necessarily that it's true. That was Cheyenne Sardarzadeh. He's a senior journalist at BBC Verify. Coming up, it is not just random people spreading misinformation about this war. It is also the governments of Israel and Hamas, how they're doing it. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames.

They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday. And she's very fortunate.

She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message,

it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A frames.com promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A

frames.com promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. It's Today Explained, and I'm Noelle King. We're back with Mark Owen-Jones. He's a professor of Middle East studies at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Qatar, and he studies specifically digital disinformation. So basically, I spend a lot of time on social media trying to find bot accounts and troll accounts and people spreading fake news. Mark recently wrote a book called Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East

in which he identifies the countries in the region that he calls digital superpowers. Put simply, a digital superpower is a country that can use digital technology, including social media, to exert its influence on a domestic, regional, and international level. And I would say in the Middle East, more broadly, the key digital superpowers in the region are Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel. Digital superpowers, as Mark defines them, have a lot of money and high penetration rates. That means the number of people using cell phones and the internet in those countries is high. These countries' governments use digital platforms like Exne Twitter to spread propaganda and misinform. I asked Mark about the context of this war.

What does it mean that Israel is a digital superpower? Well, it looks similar all around the world. I think digital technologies are generally relatively harmonized in their effects. So in Israel, you'd have highly networked closed circuit television systems that have face tracking systems that allow people who might be seen as political dissidents to be tracked. The high resolution cameras are pointed at mosques, hospitals, schools, and into people's homes. You can see it in the cameras around you. The big cameras, the small cameras, the hidden cameras, the flying cameras.

I think crucially what Israel are known to specialize in is their ability to use and subvert people's anonymity using spyware, intrusive technological surveillance. So Israel are a big exporter of Pegasus. Pegasus does not require any action by the user or a click on any suspicious links. The user receives a call from an unknown caller through the internet, and the phone gets hacked even without answering the phone call. After that, Pegasus spyware is installed on the targeted phone. And once that software is installed, it can have access to your phone microphone, to your phone camera, to your WhatsApp contacts, to anything on your phone, right? So Israel are known to specialize in this,

but they're also known to specialize in techniques of astroturfing and sock puppets. So for example, earlier this year, The Guardian and a few other organizations did an investigation. This is Tal Hanan, the mastermind behind Team Jorge, a covert unit that specializes in hacking and disinformation. He created a program called AIMS. Now, AIMS is a program that basically gives you access to this platform of fake accounts,

avatars, photos that look real, but fake accounts on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter, even on Airbnb. And the whole point of these thousands and thousands of fake accounts is to give the illusion that they're real people and engage in activities online, either to engage in propaganda or to intimidate critics. Our investigation pointed to Team Jorge's work in countries all over the world. 33 presidential-level campaigns we have completed, 27 of which were successful. When might we see Israel doing this? When might we see this sort of propaganda response, and how might it play out? Well, there's different ways, but when there's a crisis, we always see an increase in propaganda.

And this is true the world over. So, for example, in the recent escalation in Gaza, and in previous escalations in Gaza, you will see a lot of what is called, quote-unquote, Hasbura. Hasbura is the Hebrew word to explain, but it's also come to mean this term of public diplomacy. Because when Israel, for example, bombed Gaza, this creates a public backlash where people will say this is a violation of human rights. Basically, you have a large group of people mobilizing to criticize Israel, which means then there is a violation of human rights, basically you have a large group of people mobilizing to criticize Israel, which means then there is a large group of people needed to counter that discourse. And so, every time you have a bombing of Gaza, you will see a massive increase in activity online where you have accounts, some real, but many also fake, whose job it is essentially

to increase the defense of Israel online, increase the reputational defense of Israel online, and basically create a large narrative that tries to exonerate Israel from any responsibility. So when something happens, recently, the 17th of October, the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza was bombed. As soon as this happened, there was different narratives. It was reported that Israel had bombed that hospital. It is hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli airstrike or several airstrikes. However, Israel quickly denied that. All indications are that this was not Israeli ordnance,

but this was rather a Hamas rocket that fell short. But a number of accounts immediately started publishing accounts saying that this was actually a Hamas rocket that was intercepted, and they provided videos. And most of these videos were actually either old videos, videos with a different timestamp. They were fundamentally incorrect. So those narratives get put out there, and then they get inflated massively by bot accounts. Bot accounts are automated accounts that are run automatically to retweet content, right? And so that narrative gets promoted algorithmically. And so before you know it, within about an hour of the event happening, there's a massive trend saying that actually this could have been a Hamas rocket. And already that's successful. You've muddied the waters, right?

Speed is of the essence. There are photos, videos, and eyewitness accounts of the huge explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, but there's not yet clarity on who's responsible. These tactics aren't unique to necessarily Israel, but these tactics take on a life of their own in the digital world because you can put the stories out there into the information ecosystem. Very quickly, they proliferate and people lose track of who the source is. And once you lose track of who the source is, it becomes hard in many ways to corroborate it.

Let's move over to the other side of this war. Is Hamas doing the same thing with digital misinformation? Yeah, I mean, so any entity now, whether a state or a terrorist organization or political group, depending on how you want to define it, uses digital technology to get their message across. And Hamas is no different.

Videos from their tunnels are widely available on video sharing sites like YouTube. And they're active on Twitter too. They've even released guidelines on how Gazans should use Twitter to report Israeli assaults. And I think we saw during their attack on the 7th of October, they were pretty diligent in documenting what they were doing, posting very highly produced videos online, documenting certain aspects of what they were doing.

The thing is, if you're a small organization, like a relatively small organization, I think Hamas, living in the Gaza Strip mostly, living in a place where Israel control the electricity, the water, your land borders, you might have intentions to use digital technology in a way that you'd love to be on a par with, say, a digital superpower, but you can't. You physically do not have the infrastructure or the resources, right? So, in order to be a digital superpower, you need to really have a sophisticated digital infrastructure, which Hamas do not have, and they certainly do not have the ability to secure the infrastructure. At the same time, Hamas know that their videos, their kind of media outputs, because of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the nature of it

is so polarized, they know they'll also generate ainian conflict, the nature of it is so polarized, they know they'll also generate a lot of support from the Middle East and from Arabic-speaking legacy media. So they know that will happen. So they don't necessarily have to rely so much on their digital forms of digital technology to engage in this kind of propaganda. But of course, they do do it. They do use techniques of trolling and using fake accounts. They just cannot do it on the same scale as a country like Saudi, the UAE or Israel. When you think big picture about where this all leads and what this ripples out to, what is the real danger here beyond is that the nature of that bad information is often adversarial the

information often is designed to sensationalize so that it turns people against one another it promotes tribalism and polarization and we see this happening this is happening now in Israel and Palestine I think that this information and the propaganda is fueling a polarization that is exerting into conflicts and making people less likely to want to reconcile. And, you know, you don't just see it in Israel and Palestine, you see it in the US now, you know, about the right versus the left or the far right and the left. Everywhere, information is being weaponized in such a way that I think it threatens the communality we have between people and the good faith that we have between people and the willingness to listen

and actually have rational, critical discussions with other people. That was Mark Owen Jones. He researches disinformation and digital media at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Qatar. A note about facts. You heard our BBC guest Cheyenne say that Hamas killed between 1,200 and 1,300 Israelis in that attack earlier this month. And since we interviewed Cheyenne, that number is now higher. The death toll is at more than 1,400. Today's episode was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and Avishai Artsy. It was edited by Amin El-Sadi and fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Halima Shah.

Patrick Boyd is our engineer. I'm Noelle King, and this is Today Explained. you