Elon Musk ‘helping Hamas’ with changes to his X social media platform
Fake news spread by Hamas in its war against Israel is going viral online thanks to changes made by billionaire Elon Musk in a bid to get more paid content for X.
Hamas and its allies are winning the disinformation war being fought online against Israel, as regulators warn that changes to social media platform X (formerly Twitter) by billionaire owner Elon Musk have made it much easier for bogus accounts to qualify as “newsworthy”.
In one instance, a totally false claim about Israel bombing a church in Gaza went viral, garnering more than a million views in less than three hours, thanks to multiple blue tick accounts repeating an unverified claim with no evidence to back it up.
Eliot Higgins, founder of investigative journalist outlet Bellingcat, has revealed how the fake story was also spread by dozens of suspect accounts which subscribed to X Premium, a new paid service introduced by Mr Musk, which gave their posts priority over legitimate news outlets in search results.
“Musk has created a fundamental issue with Twitter’s credibility in moments of crisis,” Mr Higgins said.
“Musk hasn’t given the voiceless a voice, he’s just dragged us all down into the swamp, and the only people who truly benefit are shameless grifters.”
In previous years, Twitter would hand out verification to news organisations and journalists with a proven record of providing reliable information, but Mr Musk has introduced a system that allows anyone to buy verification without an identity check.
“Blue ticks don’t mean much when they just share unsourced allegations,” Mr Higgins said.
The false “bombed church” post originated from a claim by “investigative journalist” Sulaiman Ahmed, that the Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City, one of the oldest churches in the world, was destroyed by Israeli bombing. Ahmed is an X Premium subscriber.
The claims were re-tweeted as fact by hundreds of blue tick subscribers, including pro-Hamas Australian blogger “Syrian Girl”, who has 259,000 followers, claiming “ZIONISM IS SATANISM”.
On Tuesday, European Union industry chief Thierry Breton wrote an open letter to Mr Musk, warning him that X was spreading disinformation and illegal content related to the Israel-Hamas war.
“We have, from qualified sources, reports about potentially illegal content circulating on your service, despite flags from relevant authorities,” Breton wrote in the letter, posted on X.
Failure to comply with the EU’s new Digital Services Act can result in fines of as much as 6 per cent of a company’s global turnover – billions of dollars in the case of social media giants like X.
“Let me remind you that the Digital Services Act sets very precise obligations regarding content moderation,” Mr Breton said.
“Public media and civil society organisations widely report instances of fake and manipulated images and facts circulating on your platform in the EU, such as repurposed old images of unrelated armed conflicts or military footage that actually originated from video games.”
Mr Musk responded to the post with one of his own saying “Everything is open source and transparent, an approach that I know the EU supports. Please list the violations you allude to on X, so that the public can see them. Merci beaucoup.”
Mr Breton posted back bluntly: “Up to you to demonstrate that you walk the talk.”
Earlier this week, Mr Musk recommended his 160 million X followers to an account called WarMonitors for updates on the Gaza−Israel conflict — until it was pointed out that it had a history of antisemitic content. Mr Musk’s tweet was viewed 11 million times before he deleted it.
On Tuesday X claimed that it had taken action under its Violent and Hateful Entities Policy “to remove newly created Hamas affiliated accounts and we’re currently coordinating with industry peers … to try and prevent terrorist content from being distributed online.”
The X Safety team claimed its escalation teams had “actioned tens of thousands of posts for sharing graphic media, violent speech and hateful conduct.”
It was also “continuing to proactively monitor for anti-Semitic speech”.
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