"The volume of disinformation on Twitter was beyond anything I've seen."
Source: Reuters Institute
BBC expert on debunking images of the Israel-Hamas war:
- "You have to be 100% sure before you publish and show the audience why something is false," says journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh
By Eduardo Suarez
Shayan Sardarizadeh is a senior journalist who covers disinformation, extremism and conspiracy theories for BBC Monitoring's disinformation team as part of BBC Verify. Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, he has debunked dozens of misleading images on social media and posted his findings in widely read threads on Twitter, now known as X.
As the decades-long conflict between Israel and Hamas enters a new phase, I spoke with Sardarizadeh to learn more about his work and the kind of misleading images he and his colleagues have encountered in recent days. Our conversation was about the uptick in misinformation on various platforms, the pernicious influence of the latest changes in X, and the marginal role AI-generated visuals have played in this context. Our conversation has been edited for the sake of brevity and clarity.
- Q. You've covered previous wars - what would you say is different this time?
- A. There are similarities [with previous wars]. Today, millions of people get their information from the Internet. They don't necessarily sit in front of a television. They go to social networks to find out what is happening, especially when it comes to breaking news of this magnitude.
Good information can be found on social media. But I can excuse anyone for feeling confused if they have been searching online in the last few days, because it has been very difficult to filter out what is actually genuine images of what has been happening in Israel and Gaza, and what is clickbait or unrelated images or something that is being shared for clicks, engagement or any kind of nefarious intent.
Part of my job as a journalist at BBC Verify and BBC Monitoring is to sift through that kind of content accurately and impartially and make it easy for the audience to see what's real and what's not. So they can form their own opinion about what's going on. But we want them to know whether a video they've seen online is related to the conflict or not.
