Some Influential but unreliable accounts which have been promoted by Elon Musk are dominating news on X around the Israel-Hamas war and outpacing established mainstreams news outlets, according to research published Friday by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.<\/p>\n
Some viral posts were analyzed by researchers concerning the conflict during a three-day period starting from the beginning of the attack against Israel on Oct 7.They concluded that the most popular posts about the crisis revealed how news on the platform is \u201cfaster, more disorienting, and potentially more shaped by Musk himself.\u201d<\/p>\n
A separate analysis published Thursday by NewsGuard, a nonpartisan company that tracks false narratives online, found verified accounts were responsible for nearly three-fourths of the most viral misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war on Twitter.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat shift is real,\u201d said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington and lead author of the new report.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt its core what we\u2019re looking at here is a different vision of what news is,\u201d Caulfield said. \u201cIt\u2019s fast, it\u2019s unvetted, and it\u2019s very often unsourced. And there\u2019s every indication that the shift is not accidental and that it\u2019s part of a vision of what news is going to be on X.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe people who are engaged, they probably buy into this vision, but we have doubts that it serves the public well,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Seven high performing accounts on X were branded by researchers as ” new elites” , this is so because they exercised “disproportionate power and influence ” over Israel and Hamas news. The \u201cnew elites\u201d include: Visegr\u00e1d 24, a news aggregator run by a right-wing Polish social media marketing agency; Mario Nawfal, a Twitter celebrity known for hosting live audio chats focused on cryptocurrency who was the focus of an NBC News investigation; @spectatorindex, an account self-described as \u201cNews, media and data from around the globe,\u201d reportedly operated by an Australian-Muslim medical doctor; @CollinRugg, a co-founder of the conservative site Trending Politics; and @CensoredMen, a 10-month-old account that before pivoting to the Israel-Hamas war primarily posted in support of the misogynist internet influencer Andrew Tate.<\/p>\n
Tweets about the Israel-Hamas war from these accounts outperformed popular news accounts belonging to CNN, The New York Times, the BBC and Reuters, despite having fewer followers. Across the research period, tweets about the Israel-Hamas war from well-followed traditional news sources garnered 112 million views over 298 tweets, while tweets from the seven newly influential accounts drew 1.6 billion views across 1,834 tweets.<\/p>\n
The researchers said that changes made by Musk to X had pushed the platform in a new direction.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis occurs in an environment that has been shorn of many of the \u2018credibility signals\u2019 that served to ground users in the past \u2014 checkmarks that indicated notability, fact-checks distributed through Twitter Trends, and Twitter\/X-based labeling of deceptive content,\u201d the researchers wrote. \u201cEven fundamental affordances of the web such as simple sourcing through links have been devalued by the platform, and, perhaps as a result, by the new elites that now direct its users\u2019 attention.\u201d<\/p>\n
Musk has also called for more content creators to act as \u201ccitizen journalists\u201d and made changes to X that affected traditional news sources, including removing verification badges from journalists and news outlets and throttling the reach of tweets that include links to news websites.<\/p>\n
The researchers found that the \u201cnew elites\u201d differed in political persuasion but shared several characteristics. They posted far more than traditional news outlets, used terms like \u201cBREAKING\u201d and emojis like sirens that suggested urgency, and often excluded sourcing for their claims.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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