X now pays users based on the number of views they receive, creating a massive incentive to post sensationalistic and inflammatory lies. On-the-ground witnesses — and worse, people who need help — can’t reach their audiences unless they have a costly blue check mark and a willingness to compete with the most outrageous promoted content.
Musk has stripped headlines and summaries off article previews. Images are no longer accompanied by context, making it that much easier to misunderstand them and that much less likely that users will read the article. Meanwhile, Musk promotes — directly, via his own tweets and algorithmically — conspiracy theorists, Russian war propagandists, hostile-state media, foreign and domestic extremists and engagement farmers who exploit pain and tragedy to gain followers.
Musk has created the conditions for a flood of misinformation and fake accounts — a problem that has proven particularly acute during the current war in Gaza. AI-generated images are passed off as real: In a photo shared millions of times, for example, a man is seen carrying his children out of the ruins of a bombed building. The post says, “An image is worth a thousand words.” The Palestine flag suggests the image is from Gaza. A BBC fact-checker has confirmed the image is completely fake, generated by AI.
A massive number of accounts posting images that purport to be from Gaza are in fact posting images from unrelated conflicts. These tweets have racked up millions of views and shares.
According to Cyabra, an Israeli analysis firm, pro-Hamas forces have launched a coordinated influence operations campaign involving tens of thousands of fake profiles. As a result, one in five social media accounts participating in the conversation about the war in Gaza are fake. One in four pro-Hamas profiles are fake. It’s not clear who is creating and using these fake profiles to spread disinformation, but it could be anyone from Russian internet trolls to antisemites to far-right hucksters who are eager to make a buck.
Accounts that were once clearly labeled as state-affiliated, such as that of Iran’s Press TV, are no longer distinguished from others. In September, an EU report found that the “reach and influence” of Kremlin-backed accounts on social media, and on X in particular, had increased in 2023.
In another study, the EU found that disinformation was more easily found on X than on any other social media platform. It also received more engagement than it did on any other platform.
That report found that X had the highest ratio of what the authors called “disinformation actors” to real posts. “The average engagement with mis/disinformation content found on X is 1.977 times as high as the average engagement with non-mis/disinformation,” the authors wrote. In other words, X users are twice as likely to engage with lies as the truth.
Snuff videos have proliferated on the platform, too. A pro-Kremlin account shared a video of a beheading in Ukraine in April. Endless videos of atrocities purportedly committed by Hamas or by Israel clatter across my feed: It is all but impossible to use X now without seeing a video that shows, or purports to show, the murder of a human being.
Meanwhile, good sources of information are leaving the platform. Many of the most useful voices are now gone. Reporters have fled, largely moving to Bluesky. But Bluesky can’t replace X yet; its network is too small. You can use it to talk to other journalists, not so much to find sources or promote your work to your readers.
To judge by the responses to the fake tweets, most people have no idea they’re fake. Musk certainly doesn’t. Recently, he recommended (in a since-deleted tweet) that his followers follow two well-known disinformation accounts — one of them, for example, provides such helpful analysis as, “The overwhelming majority of people in the media and banks are zi0nists.” When Musk suggests something like this, it is not just his 162 million followers who see it. You can mute him, but unless you do, everything Musk says is now forced into the timeline of every user of the platform, whether or not they follow him.
Some will reply, correctly, that the mainstream media hasn’t covered itself in glory during this conflict either. Many news organizations have made serious mistakes in the past weeks. But the difference between sloppy or biased news coverage and millions of deliberate lies — none retracted — is significant. If you read the former, you’ll still be on this planet. If you read the latter, you’ll be in an alternate universe.
As for Israelis or Palestinians hoping to use the platform to exchange lifesaving information? Forget it. For eight bucks, anyone can impersonate the official account of the IDF. (Impersonation is still officially against X’s rules, but the lack of a real verification system makes it easier to do for longer.) How could Israelis trust warnings and updates from their government or from each other on X when Hamas or Iranian operatives can so readily pretend to be anyone they please? How would Palestinian rescuers use X to locate people who need help when every image they see directs them to Syria?
This state of affairs is massively deleterious to American national security. Members of Congress are as vulnerable to hostile disinformation as anyone else. One morning, I watched a number of Russian accounts, including that of former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, begin simultaneously to push out the line that Israel had been attacked with weapons the U.S. sent to Ukraine, which Israelis immediately denied. By afternoon, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was asserting this as fact.
Organized, state-sponsored information operations aim to generate support in the U.S. for policies that are not in our interest and dampen support for policies that are. “Feel the difference,” wrote Medvedev on X recently on a post that showed two photos: on the left, a vast sea of protesters against Israel — a U.S. ally — and, on the right, a pitiful handful of protesters against Russia’s actions in Ukraine. That Russian information operations on social media have inflamed the global orgy of antisemitism we’ve seen since Hamas’ attack goes without saying.