Researchers sifting through social media content about the Israel-Hamas conflict say it’s getting harder to verify information and track the spread of misleading material, adding to the digital fog of war.
As misinformation and violent content surrounding the war proliferate online, social media companies’ pullbacks in moderation and other policy shifts have made it “close to impossible” to do the work researchers were able to do less than a year ago, said Rebekah Tromble, the director of George Washington University’s Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics.
“It has become much more difficult for researchers to collect and analyze meaningful data to understand what’s actually happening on any of these platforms,” she said...
That change and others across social media mean “we simply don’t have nearly as much high-quality verifiable information to inform decision-making,” Tromble said. Where once researchers could sift through data in real time and “share that with law enforcement and executive agencies” relatively quickly, “that is effectively impossible now.”