https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/17/israel-gaza-syria-misinformation-propaganda/

Propagandists are exploiting Syria’s suffering to win the information war in Gaza

Videos of Aleppo – where the Assad regime's tanks fired on my grandparents in their home – are being circulated as clips from Gaza

Kareem Rifai 17 October 2023

In one video, children cry amid rubble. In another, explosions rip through residential neighbourhoods. The images have gone viral on X (formerly Twitter), purporting to be from the ongoing chaos in Israel and Gaza. They actually originate from the war in Syria – including my family’s besieged hometown of Aleppo, where the Assad regime’s tanks once fired on my grandparents’ home while they were still inside.

They are not isolated examples, and the proliferation of misinformation on X is now so extreme that the European Commission began an official investigation last week. The past week has proved that the site is now unable to effectively tackle the spread of falsehoods in a time of crisis. Elon Musk must act quickly to prevent more harm.

In this case, the images aren’t just being used to delegitimise the state of Israel. Many of the videos are of Syrian cities and civilians, largely due to Syria’s geographic adjacency to Israel-Palestine, and their use constitutes a dangerous form of atrocity revisionism. Attributing crimes committed by the Syrian regime and the Russian government to other regional actors gives way to the erasure of Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin’s culpability in the destruction of multiple Syrian cities.

And yet still the images flow. Just hours after the start of Hamas’ attack last weekend, a viral video purported to show missile fire from Gaza toward Israel. Only after receiving millions of views did a Community Note appeared below the post pointing to the source as a three-year-old video, most likely from Syria. Although this helped to mitigate the unchallenged spread of the video, the lag in its implementation created a window of irreversible misinformation.

In another, now-deleted post, a video of the Assad regime bombing the Syrian town of Ariha, which was happening concurrent to the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war, was represented as the Israeli Defence Forces bombing the Gaza Strip. This post garnered over a million views before its deletion, giving cover to the Assad regime in real-time as it used the chaos in Israel and Gaza to amplify its siege of rebel-held northern Syria. These strikes included attacks against at least ten schools and multiple other sites of civilian assembly in my family’s home governorates of Aleppo and Idlib.

The prevalence of misattributed Syria videos only continues to grow as the Israeli offensive against Hamas intensifies, effectively rewriting the Assad regime’s crimes. A several-year-old video of a crying Syrian child during the Assad regime’s siege of Aleppo, purported to be a Palestinian in Gaza, received millions of views in total.

By far the most egregious appropriation of Syrian suffering has been the dissemination of an image of child victims of the Eastern Ghouta gas attacks committed by the Assad regime, which killed hundreds of Syrians a decade ago. An influencer posted the image, claiming that the pictured children were Palestinians “murdered” by Israel, a claim which millions saw. Incredibly, this was even reposted by US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

As the Israel-Gaza information war rages on X, it is all too clear that the Community Note system is unable to keep up with the real-time spread of rapidly viral misinformation — even reaching the eyes of unwitting American politicians. Despite being detached from the hostilities in Israel and Gaza, Syrian civilians like my now-passed grandparents have become the unknown victims of a new revisionist misinformation ecosystem enabled by a platform that incentivises and promotes content made purely for clicks, not truth. They deserve better.