Need to check fake posts on conflicts

A s news of Palestinian militant group Hamas launching a deadly attack on Israel and Israel’s threat of retaliation began to filter across news networks and social media platforms, a wave of misinformation and fake videos rose alongside

- MITALI MUKHERJEE

In a “tech-first” society, it is increasingly difficult to differentiate between authentic information and false claims or deliberately misleading video content. It is clear that numerous videos, social media posts and images purportedly about the Israel–Hamas conflict are deliberately misleading.

This problem highlights why the verification efforts of journalists reporting on conflicts are vital. And understanding how they work is important for ensuring the public can have confidence in what they read and see from media publishers.

The Digital News Report 2023 from the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute, of which I am acting director, surveyed people from 46 countries about their news consumption habits. It found 56 per cent said they were worried about identifying the difference between what is real and fake on the internet when it comes to news – up from 54 per cent in 2022.

There is heightened concern among audiences in areas close to violent conflict. As our survey found, in Slovakia, one of the countries bordering Ukraine, almost half the sample said they had seen misinformation about the Ukraine conflict in the previous week. That’s double the proportion that said this in the UK, United States or Japan.