Social Media Platforms Must Do Better When Handling Misinformation, Especially During Moments of Conflict

In moments of political tension and social conflict, people have turned to social media to share information, speak truth to power, and report uncensored information from their communities. Just over a decade ago, social media was celebrated widely as a booster—if not a catalyst—for the democratic uprisings that swept the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and elsewhere. That narrative was always more complex than popular media made it out to be, and these platforms always had a problem sifting out misinformation from facts. But in those early days, social media was a means for disenfranchised and marginalized individuals, long overlooked by mainstream media, to be heard around the world. Often, for the first time. 

Yet in the wake of Hamas’ deadly attack on southern Israel last weekend—and Israel’s ongoing retributive military attack and siege on Gaza—misinformation has been thriving on social media platforms. In particular, on X (formerly known as Twitter), a platform stripped of its once-robust policies and moderation teams by CEO Elon Musk and left exposed to the spread of information that is false (misinformation) and deliberately misleading or biased (disinformation).  

It can be difficult to parse out verified information from information that has been misconstrued, misrepresented, or manipulated. And the entwining of authentic details and real newsworthy events with old footage or manufactured information can lead to information genuinely worthy of record—such as a military strike in an urban area—becoming associated with a viral falsehood.  Indeed, Bellingcat—an organization that was founded amidst the Syrian war and has long investigated mis- and disinformation in the region—found one current case where a widely shared video was said to show something false, but further investigation revealed that although the video itself was inauthentic, the information in the text of the post was accurate and highly newsworthy.

As we’ve said many, many times, content moderation does not work at scale, and there is no perfect way to remove false or misleading information from a social media site. But platforms like X have backslid over the past year on a number of measures. Once a relative leader in transparency and content moderation, X has been criticized for failing to remove hate speech and has disabled features that allow users to report certain types of misinformation. Last week, NBC reported that the publication speed on the platform’s Community Notes feature was so slow that notes on known disinformation were being delayed for days. Similarly, TikTok and Meta have implemented lackluster strategies to monitor the nature of content on their services. 

But there are steps that social media platforms can take to increase the likelihood that their sites are places where reliable information is available—particularly during moments of conflict. 

Platforms should:

• have robust trust and safety mechanisms in place that are proportionate to the volume of posts on their site to address misinformation, and vet and respond to user and researcher complaints; 
• ensure their content moderation practices are transparent, consistent, and sufficiently resourced in all locations where they operate and in all relevant languages; 
• employ independent, third-party fact-checking, including to content posted by States and gover