The war in Israel also intensifies the battle between X and traditional media

During events such as this terrible Israel-Hamas war, trusted and fact-checking information and news sources are crucial.

Especially in a war like this, where the news flow is constant and huge, the situation is geopolitically explosive and lots of emotions are involved.

The first thing that’s lost during a war is nuance. And, as we know by now, facts. And that’s a real issue.

As X — and other socials — is a platform where it seems nuance has increasingly become an issue, it’s a challenging place to go for fact-checked and relevant information. Especially in times of war.

Because of the continuous and huge stream of posts, misinformation is widely spread, including fake videos, false claims, irrelevant opinions by ‘living room experts’ (many of those), etc.

So, you have to be aware and take time to find the truth. If you do at all. It’s war after all.

Local intel

It even got as far that the EU and Musk are at ‘war’ over the new Digital Services Act (DSA), because of misinformation on X. Musk now threatens to shut off X in the EU.

So, yes, it’s a fact that there is a lot of misinformation on social channels. But at the same time, X has a lot of added value. Also during a war.

The platform is full of local intel that is highly valuable. Definitely. Intel that regular media don’t always use or have as a source (even though they could find it by just spending some time on X).

MSM blunders

Traditional media have massively underperformed as well this week.

The already notorious ‘hospital attack’ will be an example for media history books.

Traditional media were too fast with blaming Israel for bombing a Gaza hospital leading to “500 casualties”. It’s still not clear what exactly happened, and we might never know, but it’s clear now it could also have been a Hamas rocket or something else. Number of casualties is probably more towards 50 than 500, but also that might be a secret forever.

Anyway, BBC even apologised for being wrong. Well, they sort of apologised.

In the Netherlands, the same.

The chief editor of Dutch national media publisher NOS had to apologise (also not a convincing apology) on national radio after being too fast with an online article blaming Israel for the attack on the Gaza hospital.

Professional

Social media and traditional media both have to do better in containing nad limiting misinformation.

But there’s a big difference: traditional media are professional journalist organzations, X isn’t.

The basic rules to be followed by journalists is that they check facts, don’t publish when in doubt, check who the source is and how reliable he/she/it is (does the source have a special interest to tell the story as they do?). Just taking Hamas’ or Israel’s word for it is not the wisest way to go in a war.

A civilian not checking the source on X is one thing. A professional journalist not doing that is a big issue.

What probably doesn’t help is that traditional media feel extra rushed by social media to publish fast. But that can of course never be an excuse.

So, this week was a huge loss of reputation for MSM. And while X has it flaws, without a doubt, the platform is less to blame for showing misinformation. Yes, rules are needed.

The battle this week has been won by X.

At X, it just takes some time to cut through the noise to get to the truth. But it’s probably somewhere out there. On MSM it’s black/white. It’s either true or not.