The Big Story
Dec 21, 2023
Distortion by design: How social media platforms shaped our initial understanding of the Israel-Hamas conflict
By
Emerson T. Brooking, Layla Mashkoor, Jacqueline Malaret
Almost as soon as the Israel-Hamas war began, it collided with the engineering and policy decisions of social media companies. On Telegram, terrorist content spread mostly uncontested; on X, false claims proliferated. Accusations of anti-Palestinian bias at Meta and pro-Palestinian bias at TikTok added to the confusion. Can the platforms thread this needle?