--:-- Noel King: 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.
--:-- Noel King: 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.
--:-- Noel King: 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.
--:-- Noel King: Coming up on Today Explained. Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
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--:-- Noel King: Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at TheGuardian.com. It's Today Explained. I'm Noel King. So a lot of stuff circulating about this war is not real. What to do about that? Enter Cheyenne Sardarzada. 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: OK, so misinformation is mistakenly put out. Disinformation is deliberate.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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. It's not even real.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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 fog of war that shocks people. And then it turns out it's completely unsourced. There's no evidence for it.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: You know, it's somebody who'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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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?
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: And the caption on the video said, several high-profile Israeli generals captured by Hamas fighters. Quote-unquote, that's what it said.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: So when I saw that I was like okay we have reporters on the ground they not telling us anything like it They contacted the IDF They not saying any of the generals have been taken hostage So let properly check this
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: And if you check the video there a moment in the video that one of the security agents wearing a military uniform has the logo DTX on there.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: And I just searched for DTX and, you know, lo and behold, DTX is the state security service of Azerbaijan.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: So then I thought, OK, this video must have been shared at some point somewhere of the Azerbaijanis security service arresting some people.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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 Azerbaijanis language, looking for that video.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: And I found a video uploaded on the 5th of October on YouTube by the official account of the Azerbaijani state security service with a verified YouTube channel.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: Then I searched online to see whether any Azerbaijani news sources had reported this happening on the 5th of October, and I found several.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: Those are not Israeli generals. This video was taken in Azerbaijan and is related to the dispute there between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: And that's how it took off and became really big. That sounds like disinformation to me. That sounds deliberate to me.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: You said it's misinformation. What do you think?
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: I would categorize that as misinformation because I think most of the people who shared it had no idea what it was.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: So somebody had gone through the effort to copy our branding and style and 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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 like something like two, three million people who were watching their live stream.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: That type of content goes viral, regardless of whether it's true or not. So that's one incentive.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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, you know, a group of nations, some politicians, some influential people about what is going on, which is politically in their favor.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: How many people see the work that you do versus the thing that you end up debunking?
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: When you think about the tide of misinformation, just this tide of bullcrap, 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?
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: Look, I'm an optimistic person. And I still think the vast majority of people have common sense, are good people and want to get factual information.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: And I still think most people still believe in such a thing as a shared truth. I do.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: One of the things that I do constantly, and I take pure joy from it, is I try to, on social media, on say X, I try to do threads, like media literacy threads.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: Many of the stuff that goes viral online that is false or misleading would take minutes to check, sometimes seconds, honestly.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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 the power of social media that just because something is viral, it doesn't mean it's true.
--:-- Cheyenne Sardarzada: 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.
--:-- Noel King: That was Cheyenne Sardarzada. 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.
--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards. These days, it seems like everybody has a rewards program. You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars. But with your rent, frequently, you just pay month after month. You never get anything from it other than that roof over your head.
--:-- Noel King: Not anymore, says Built Rewards. Built Rewards says it lets you earn points on your rent. By paying rent through Built, they say you can earn flexible points that can be redeemed toward hundreds of hotels and airlines, perhaps a future rent payment.
--:-- Noel King: Your home isn't just where you sleep, it's your community, and Built wants you to go out and do things in the community. You can eat at your favorite local restaurants, then earn more points.
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--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained, and I'm Noel King. We're back with Mark Owen-Jones. He's a professor of Middle East Studies at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Qatar.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: I spend a lot of time in social media trying to find bot accounts and troll accounts and people spreading fake news.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: These countries' governments use digital platforms like Twitter to spread propaganda and misinform.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: I asked Mark about the context of this war. What does it mean that Israel is a digital superpower?
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: Well, it looks similar all around the world. I think digital technologies are generally relatively harmonized in their effects.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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 distance to be tracked.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: The high-resolution cameras are pointed at mosques, hospitals, schools, and into people's homes. You can see it in the cameras around you.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: So Israel are a big exporter of Pegasus. Pegasus does not require any action by the user or a click on any suspicious links.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: The user receives a call from an unknown caller through the internet, and the phone gets hacked even without answering the phone call.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: So Israel are known to specialize in this, But they're also known to specialize in techniques of astroturfing and sock puppets.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: When might we see Israel doing this? When might we see this sort of propaganda response and how might it play out?
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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, Hasbara. Hasbara is the Hebrew word to explain, but it's also come to mean this term of public diplomacy.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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 large group of people needed to counter that discourse
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: And so every time you have a bombing of Gaza you will see a massive increase in activity online where you have accounts some are 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 creates a large narrative that tries to exonerate Israel from any responsibility.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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 ordinance, but this was rather a Hamas rocket that fell short.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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?
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: And already that's successful. You've muddied the waters, right? Speed is of the essence.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Noel King: Let's move over to the other side of this war. Is Hamas doing the same thing with digital misinformation?
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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 you know, Israel controls 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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 a lot of support from the Middle East and from Arabic-speaking legacy media.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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.
--:-- Noel King: When you think big picture about where this all leads and what this ripples out to, what is the real danger here beyond just it gives people bad information?
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: I mean, the real danger for me 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.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: 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 accepting conflict and making people less likely to want to reconcile.
--:-- Mark Owen-Jones: And, you know, you don't just see in Israel, Palestine, you see 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 people and the willingness to listen and actually have rational, critical discussions with other people.
--:-- Noel King: That was Mark Owen-Jones. He researches disinformation and digital media at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Qatar.
--:-- Noel King: 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. Since we interviewed Cheyenne, that number is now higher. The death toll is at more than 1,400.
--:-- Noel King: 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.
--:-- Noel King: Patrick Boyd is our engineer. I'm Noel King, and this is Today Explained. We'll see you next time.
--:-- Noel King: Look nice. Nice. Love the way you look. Men's Warehouse.
