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Israel-Hamas war: The war on truth

CNA looks at how social media has been weaponised in the Israel-Hamas war, as part of an 8-part special video series on the war.

Israel-Hamas war: The war on truth

Doctored images of football superstar Lionel Messi holding the Israeli and Palestinian flags have been circulated online.

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A shocking video, purportedly of Israeli children caged and apparently kept hostage, multiplied across the Internet in the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel.

The images sparked horror, outrage, disgust, especially since the video was circulated with claims that these children were being held captive by Hamas militants.

But some social media commenters claimed otherwise, saying the same images showed Palestinian children captured by the Israeli army, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), as revenge for the tragedy of October 7.

Who do we trust? Who can we trust? Neither claim is true.

A video of children in a cage, misrepresented as children being held hostage by Hamas militants.

Following October 7, social media and international news outlets, even the old-fashioned press, have been inundated with stories, allegations and images obscured by the fog of war. 

Did superstar footballer Lionel Messi declare support for Israel or Palestine? Pictures circulating online show him apparently doing both.

Did supermodel Bella Hadid , whose father is Palestinian, really say she stood with Israel against Hamas terror? Or was her statement faked?

One media outlet appeared to show American soldiers fighting on the ground in Gaza. 

They weren’t.

Truth is serious business. Lies masquerading as truth are dangerous. As conflict envelops Gaza and the wider Middle East, truth is taking a battering. Who can we believe? Or do we simply choose the story we like most?

The battle for truth is still winnable. CNA turned to Jolene Jerard, the Executive Director of Centinel Global to take a hard look at the images of the caged children.

Singapore-based Centinel is dedicated to "the ethos of connecting the dots in a rapidly evolving and complex security environment". 

So were those caged children Israelis or Palestinian? Jerard carried out a reverse image search by taking a frame from the video and comparing it to other images on the Internet to track down when the video was first posted.

She soon got a hit. The video had been uploaded three days before October 7 and had been published on TikTok. The owner of the TikTok account, speaking in Arabic, soon confessed on TikTok that the children were members of his own family. They had nothing to do with either Hamas or the IDF.

The notorious "caged children" video was a one-off incident. But many other viral stories and videos more often come in waves.

In the aftermath of October 7, one such wave of misinformation claimed that after the Hamas attack, Israel was blighted by storms and flooding on a Biblical scale. As these stories multiplied, more reputable news sources carried stories that Israel’s plans to retaliate and destroy Hamas had been delayed by bad weather.

It was all fabricated.

Analysis of the videos revealed that they showed storms and freak weather events in Turkey, Nepal and India. Few people viewing these videos on TikTok and other social media outlets have time or resources to scrutinise the storm of images that are unleashed day after day.

But very few of these highly charged, incendiary stories survive the scrutiny of experts using techniques like reverse image analysis.

Those photographs of Lionel Messi where he seems to back Israel and Palestine? Was he supporting both or neither?

A look for the source images of Messi shows the 
pictures were originally taken long before October 7 by Icons, a company that sells football merchandise and has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine.
Doctored images of football superstar Lionel Messi holding the Israeli and Palestinian flags have been circulated online.

Security consultant Shashi Jayakumar, commenting on the images said "clearly someone has been fairly creative".

According to scientist Serene Koh, who directs The Behavioural Insights Team in Singapore, it is the most contentious, bloody or shocking images like those caged children that gain traction the fastest and for the longest time.

Take the hashtag #pallywood, an amalgam of Hollywood and Palestine. The hashtag appears on videos that allege that Hamas is using Palestinian actors to stage images of casualties implying that stories of Palestinian suffering are faked or exaggerated.

But as Shashi Jayakumar discovered, one such video dates back to 2013 and was filmed in Egypt.

Other videos using the same hashtag have been widely circulated to apparently show children taking a break from playing dead.

One particular video with that allegation was shot in Thailand during Halloween. There are many other examples that manipulate images to insinuate that Palestinian suffering is fake.

In these cases, the technology is basic. But even more troubling are fake events created by highly sophisticated video game software.

Gaming technology has been used to fake images of Iranian fighters attacking an Israeli ship, and the video was then uploaded on YouTube. The same technology was used to manufacture a story of American soldiers fighting in Gaza.

It exploits difficulty in distinguishing between real-world footage and war games.

Another complication is the threat of artificial intelligence when it is misused to manipulate media. Remember supermodel Bella Hadid and her speech about how the tragedy of October 7 "opened her eyes to pain" and where she says "I stand with Israel against terror"?

Her passionate statement was thought to be striking because her family is part-Palestinian. As it turned out, she had said no such thing.

Instead, someone had used deepfake technology to manipulate a speech Hadid made in 2016 about growing up with Lyme Disease.  And there are many other examples of manipulated media used to push misinformation.

Oftentimes, these are malicious and upset more than individuals and their families. Manipulating the truth on social media can humiliate, shame and denigrate. When conflict consumes societies and nations, the danger proliferates.

Fake news is nothing new, but now it can wield powerful new weapons that can convince millions of viewers of untruthful "truths", lies, that as they spin around the world at the speed of light can have unimaginable consequences.

Jolene Jerard put it plainly: "If we play into misinformation and disinformation, we push the narratives and the polarisation of communities further, so much so that it might be very difficult to go back to where communities were in terms of trust."

Watch CNA's 8-part special on the Israel-Hamas war on YouTube and on the CNA website.

Source: CNA

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