FACT CHECK: SOCIAL MEDIA IS FLOODED WITH MISINFORMATION ABOUT THE ISRAEL-HAMAS ESCALATION

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Thu 12 October 2023:

Since Hamas launched an attack on Israel on Saturday morning,  Social media platforms has been flooded with disinformation and misinformation that has heightened tensions across the globe. Disinformation refers to the deliberate spread of false information, while misinformation is when someone unwittingly spreads or believes the false information to be true.

Against this backdrop, multiple videos depicting the carnage in the current conflict are being circulated on social media. Independent Press will look into some of these viral videos one by one in this article.

Claim:

A user Ashlea Simon @AshleaSimonBF tweeted, “Israeli children kidnapped and kept in cages by Hamas. This is barbaric but what do you expect from savages.”

#Israel #Hamas #Palestine #Palestinian #IronDome #Gaza #TelAviv. By Monday, 9 AM IST the video had more than 1.3 million views.

Another popular right-wing Twitter comment Ian Miles Cheong, who originally hails from Malaysia and now lives in the US, also tweeted this. And later deleted the tweet.

Fact Check:

But is this really true? Facebook accounts abound with videos of Palestinian children being held in cages by Israeli Defence Forces. But there doesn’t seem to be many mainstream media reports talking about this. In fact a Sun News report talks of Palestinian children being held in cages — but it shows an older video from Facebook and not the current video that’s going viral on social media.

Meanwhile on social media, many commentators called out pro-Israel supporters for usage of this video. A user Commie Trucker @commie_trucker tweeted, “The absurdity of displaying Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians to drum up support for Israel is staggering.

These are in fact Palestinian children being held in cages by Israeli Armed Forces.”

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Claim:

The video shows a young boy in a black T-shirt apparently lying in a pool of blood on the ground. Above him is a camera, with a man shouting directions near him. Two men in kippahs, the Jewish skull caps, and men in green military fatigues similar to Israel Defence Forces (IDF) uniforms are gathered around him.

The clip has been viewed about 2m times on X, formerly known as Twitter. It was shared by a verified user with the caption: “Video showing Israel attempting to create fake footage of deaths.”

Screengrab from video that went viral on TikTok and X

Screengrab from video that went viral on TikTok and X. Photograph: TikTok

Fact Check:

The clip is a behind-the-scenes shot from a Palestinian short film, Empty Place, which focuses on the vacuum left by Palestinians who fled due to the Israeli occupation. It seems to have originated on TikTok before finding its way to X – but while the original TikTok post now appears to be unavailable, on X it has continued to circulate and gain traction.

The scene from Empty Place. Photograph: YouTube

The user behind the X post that attracted 2m views later acknowledged the clip may have been used out of context.

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Claim:

Another example comes from Ashlea Simon, the chairperson of the Right-Wing British political party Britain First. In the footage she shared, fighter jets were seen being carried on trucks and a roadside signboard saying ‘Ar’ara Ba Negev and Arad’. It has been claimed that the Israeli Defense Forces had begun evacuating airports near Gaza due to thousands of terrorists entering Israel. (Archived link)

Fact Check:

Performing a reverse image search of frames taken from the video on Google. We found this video in a tweet dated September 15 of this year. A second user had also tweeted the same footage on September 13. This confirms that the video had been posted online before the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, which started on October 7.

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Claim: 

This video features a man sitting and a little girl, who, users claim, is a kidnapped Jew from Gaza, standing next to her Hamas terrorist captor. Pakistan-origin user Faraz Parvaiz tweeted this video with the same claim.

Fact Check:

If you noticed a TikTok watermark on the video with the username @izzeddin_masama. This account had either been deleted or deactivated. To gather more information about the video, we performed a keyword search on Twitter. This led us to a reply from a user, who termed the claim made with the viral video as fake and said that it was a month old. The post also contained a TikTok link.

When we clicked this link, it led us to the same video by @izzeddin_masama which has now been deleted. When we searched for the cached version of the link, we discovered that the same video was being shared in connection with the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. We looked at the source code of this web page. This video was uploaded on September 9 of this year. This means that it was made before the conflict began on October 7, and is not related to the ongoing conflict.

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Claim: 

In this video, fireworks can be seen all over a city skyline. While sharing this, users are claiming that fireworks were being set off in Gaza after Israel launched air strikes on the Hamas locations.

Fact Check:

This video also has a watermark of a TikTok username (@ramiguerfi41). When we searched this account with the help of a VPN, we did not find this video on this account. After performing a reverse image search using frames from the video on Google, we found another tweet which made a similar claim carrying the video. Several users had replied to the tweet, commenting that this video was old. We also found a reply containing the link to the TikTok account with the username seen in the viral video. We checked this link and found that the video had been deleted.

When we accessed the cached version of the video link on Google’s search engine, we found that this was the same video which was being shared in connection with the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. When we looked at the source code of this web page, we found that this video was uploaded on September 28 of this year, days before the Hamas attack on Israel. In other words, the video can not be related to the present conflict.

-Input with Alt News

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