The fine line between truth and misinformation: What to know before you hit ‘share’

On October 9, 2023, while the country was reeling from events that were plunging Israel into war, an alarming video landed in various Facebook feeds of babies and small children trapped in cages, with a caption indicating that these were Jewish children who were kidnapped to Gaza on Oct. 7. A man is heard laughing as the children look petrified.

Shocked and upset, your finger hovers over the “Share” button. The world must know! And it’s your duty to tell them. The only problem is, the children in the video were the videographer’s own children, and the video was taken before Oct. 7, reportedly as a joke for TikTok.

The accompanying hashtag, “The Chinese have no way out (you can’t fix them),” is apparently an Arabic hashtag indicating that it is a video made for entertainment. However, the same video with Russian subtitles went viral on X/Twitter, alleging that these are Palestinian children who were captured by Israelis. By sharing this video, you innocently and instantly spread misinformation.

Who shared this to begin with? Was the intention of the original creator of the “news” item a good one? Who was intent on spreading disinformation? How do we differentiate news from rumor, especially in this fast-paced world where news breaks and discussion begins moments after an event takes place?

JUST LAST week, as news of Israel’s first fatal shark attack recorded since the country’s founding rocked the media, social media was taking the story beyond the awful Jaws-worthy videos.

There were claims that the victim, Baruch Tzach, a fisherman, had gone out to swim among the sharks on the Hadera beach with fish tied to his body. The claims became so outrageous that Sarit Tzach, the Petah Tikva widow of the victim, sent a missive designed to dispel the rumors that were being spread throughout social media regarding the circumstances of his death.

She wrote, “On the day of his death, Baruch arrived at the beach after a day of work, as he often did. He entered the sea equipped with a snorkel, mask, fins, and a GoPro camera – without anything else, and certainly not with fish or bait, contrary to the rumors that have been spread. Baruch entered the water to dive and document sharks, not to feed them or play with them.

“In a conversation I had with a fisherman who witnessed the incident, he told me that he swam alongside him and then moved slightly away to a more open area. Baruch photographed the sharks from a distance but did not touch or feed them. When they began to get too close to him, he used the stick of the GoPro camera to gently push them away. The fisherman called him back to shore, and Baruch began to swim slowly toward him – and then he was attacked.

“The family would like to refrain from spreading false or unfounded information, and to honor the memory of a loved one who loved the sea and nature,” she concluded.

This was in response to platforms like X that highlighted risky behaviors by beachgoers, noting that people swam in an area known for shark congregations, particularly due to the warm water discharged from the Hadera power plant.

WhatsApp groups filled with news junkies shared the story with their members, and chat groups mulled over and discussed at great length the alarming breaking news.

Another example: On Friday, February 21, the day after an insane news cycle that included multiple bus explosions in Gush Dan and the return of the Bibas children’s bodies, along with the fake remains of Shiri Bibas, rumors were flying about the scope of the bus bombings, saying that 15 buses were supposed to explode, suicide bombers were to be dispatched on the light rails, and terrorists were amassing on the seam line preparing to invade the center of the country.

The rumors spread like wildfire as thousands of frightened social media users hit the “Share” button.

Does a gag order prove a story is true?

On February 23, the Israeli government issued a gag order on the event. The government might impose a gag order for several reasons. First, limiting the flow of information helps preserve the integrity of the investigation, preventing suspects or accomplices from learning details that could enable them to evade capture. Additionally, if security forces are conducting ongoing operations to uncover a broader network of attackers, publicizing too much information could compromise those efforts.

Another key factor is national security. If the attack was linked to a larger planned operation, such as multiple coordinated bombings or an invasion, keeping details under wraps could prevent panic and ensure that intelligence agencies maintain a strategic advantage.

On April 23, a Palestinian resident of Nablus who was involved was indicted for assisting in building the bombs. His brother, who allegedly planted the bombs on the buses, is still at large. No mention was made of the “larger plot.” Was it real or just a figment of social media imagination?

In short, a gag order does not confirm or negate the accuracy of a news story.

Where do people get their news?

There has been a media revolution in the world, especially in Israel. After Oct. 7, 2023, the news, moving at breakneck speed, saw a proliferation of social media and digital news outlets outpacing mainstream news media, producing minute-by-minute updates, videos, and commentary much faster than traditional broadcast news outlets. While X was always a few steps ahead of traditional outlets, especially during Israeli wars, Oct. 7 saw a spate of newly minted groups on WhatsApp and Telegram that were suddenly pulling information from international sources in many languages.

“Expert” commentary was being forwarded from ordinary people with no news background, as well as from cadres of “in-the-know” reporters. Some news, poorly translated, was too badly written to make sense.

Nascent news organizations include Jewish News Community, Jewish Breaking News, Bernie News Network, Jerusalem News, Alan Silver News Group, The Middle East, and even more Hebrew-language groups. As the groups fill up, they spill over into additional groups and subgroups.

Adam Mallerman, digital marketing manager at JNS.org, wrote on Linked In, “Today, my team and I narrate events in Israel and the global Jewish community directly on social media, especially since Oct. 7, 2023.”

He noted that “Social media platforms have become formidable competitors to legacy media, transforming how people access news.”

Mallerman referenced a Media Insight Project study which revealed that 71% of Americans aged 16 to 40 get their daily news from social media, while 45% rely on traditional sources like television, radio, newspapers, and news websites. (When it was pointed out that it adds up to well over 100%, he surmised that the samples overlapped, with some people getting news from a variety of sources.)

Better late and accurate, than first and wrong

Mallerman went on to explain that social media offers real-time news updates, eliminating waits for scheduled broadcasts, and that algorithms curate custom content for user preferences. He also noted that social media offers the reader interaction with content.

Alan Silver, banned by Facebook after amassing more than 40,000 friends during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, started Alan Silver Newsgroups on WhatsApp to keep spreading news. Silver, who owns a store in Telz Stone, monitors and disseminates breaking news as a sideline. After Oct. 7, 2023, his newsgroups mushroomed into five WhatsApp groups with thousands of followers, including subgroups.

He makes it a policy to publish each news item along with its sources. He monitors traditional media and alternative news sources but waits for verification before he publishes, not caring whether he is first to publish, with a philosophy of “Better late and accurate, than first and wrong.” He also mines leads from WhatsApp groups consisting of retired generals and seasoned journalists; and for unsubstantiated news, he runs it by experts in the group before publishing.

“I verify information with responsible journalists,” he explained. “They have their own integrity to worry about and won’t talk nonsense.”

Silver translates, copies, and pastes the stories with the published sources to allow the public to do their own research if they so choose.

Mainstream media misinformation

Mainstream media is not immune from spreading misinformation.

The Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion in Gaza on October 17, 2023, sparked widespread misinformation spread by mainstream media. Initially, Hamas blamed an Israeli airstrike, and many media outlets echoed this claim. However, Israeli and US intelligence later attributed the blast to a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket. Open-source analysis supported this, showing damage inconsistent with an airstrike.

Despite this, social media and political narratives amplified unverified claims, fueling protests and diplomatic tensions. The incident underscored the rapid spread of misinformation in conflicts and the importance of verifying facts before drawing conclusions.

The explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital occurred at 6:59 p.m. It was initially reported by several major news outlets based on claims from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, which attributed the blast to an Israeli airstrike. The New York Times published its first report at 7:20 p.m. local time, repeating the Hamas accusation before later updating its coverage.

Al Jazeera provided live coverage at 7:30 p.m., strongly emphasizing Hamas’s version. Reuters and the Associated Press (AP) published their reports at approximately 7:40 p.m., also citing Palestinian sources before later integrating Israeli and US intelligence assessments. BBC News followed at 7:45 p.m., initially citing Palestinian officials blaming Israel before incorporating Israeli denials. The Guardian reported the incident at 8:00 p.m., first echoing Hamas’s claim and later modifying its story.

Subsequent investigations, including satellite analysis and audio intercepts, suggested the explosion was more likely caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) rocket, leading some outlets to issue corrections or updates. The rapid spread of initial, unverified claims highlighted today’s challenges of real-time war reporting and the risks of misinformation in high-conflict environments.

Everyman journalists and big bad bots

“This is the difference between ‘news’ and ‘media,’” said Efraim Roseman, a senior coordinator at Israel’s Government Press Office. “News is verifiable. Anyone who journals can call themselves a ‘journalist,’ but is their news real?”

Asa Shapira, a researcher at Tel Aviv University and the Agam Institute (a research institute of Israeli public opinion), and head of marketing and advertising studies at TAU’s Department of Communications, said, “If a news commentator says it’s raining, and another says it’s not raining, the role of the news is not to present both sides but rather to go outside and make a determination.”

Open source intelligence (OSINT) uses publicly available data, digital tools, and crowdsourced analysis to verify news and investigate events. It relies on satellite imagery, social media, geolocation, and metadata analysis for fact-checking. Transparent in methodology, it counters misinformation and holds governments accountable.

But OS media can be manipulated through deepfakes, AI-generated content, bot networks, metadata alteration, and image tampering. False narratives can spread via doctored satellite images, misattributed footage, and social media manipulation. OSINT counters this through cross-verification, geolocation, and forensic analysis to expose misinformation.

Technology, with its nosy algorithms and machine learning, has figured out how to divide and conquer us.

Amir Mizrach, communications adviser and former tech editor at The Wall Street Journal and former editor at The Jerusalem Post, currently moderates a podcast called The Dejargonizer. His guests are usually founders of very technical businesses. His audience is a broad base of businesspeople, journalists, investors, and communications people. He unpacks the technology in simple terms for them.

“Before clicking on a news story,” Mizrach suggested, “everyone online should ask, ‘What am I about to see or hear? What is the source. Is it reliable?’ People forward me stuff that they are forwarded themselves, but no one actually says, ‘Wait – is this a fair reflection or representation of what it’s talking about? Has anybody actually checked it out?’

“When it happens on WhatsApp groups, it has more veracity because it is coming from friends or people you trust,” he said. “TikTok is weaponized and is founding a zombie generation of Israel-haters. If someone asks, ‘What am I looking at here?’ – if you’ve done that step, you’re already in that place.

“The next step,” he continued, “is to ask who benefits from this narrative being out there. Where are the talking points coming from? Whose interests are being served? We are in a post-truth era. People don’t think about it seriously.”

Truth and objectivity

“We live in an age where it is impossible to find objective news,” said Daniel Ravner, CEO of Brinker, a Tel Aviv-based misinformation threat management platform that automates the manual process of open source investigation.

“We live in such a polarized society that you could argue that almost all news is misinformation for someone. Narratives and the framing have become more important than fact. Facts are the basis for narratives.”

Ravner categorized the framing as either disinformation – intentionally distributing information that you know isn’t true; misinformation – spreading information you believe to be true that isn’t true; and malinformation – distributing information that should not be made public.

Brinker is an end-to-end misinformation threat management platform that serves the public sector and businesses to combat online harassment and phishing to malicious narratives, using proprietary content analysis, AI-enabled detection, and automated investigations.

Bernard Moerdler, who moved to Israel five years ago from Fairlawn, New Jersey, started an open source news source in 2018 as a project to stay on top of the news for his family.

“There was so much fluff and opinion,” he explained. “I wanted straight information. I started on a Twitter account called Aurora Intel, which grew to 274,000 followers as an open source intelligence news source. I sent out straight news. While it started as a group for my immediate family, people invited friends and it leaked.”

Now the Bernie News Network (BNN – https://bernie.news/) has tens of thousands of readers and works with some of the largest mainstream media organizations.

“Even the IDF and the Israeli government reach out to get information from us,” Moerdler said. “We get questions from spokespersons for the IDF and have developed relationships with them, since we are sometimes faster culling information than their own units. We have advanced networks of sources in Iran and Gaza. We began reaching out to people, and eventually people came to us.”

HE GAVE an example from the first Iran attack, explaining that BNN was providing information on positions, trajectories, and the types of drones coming in from its sources in Iran and Iraq, adding that his network quickly learned skills that included satellite digital analysis and geolocating.

“When I started growing the news network, I had to optimize and make it easier from a tech standpoint,” explained Moerdler, who has been working with computers since age four. He grew up involved in his parents’ tech start-up, which eventually sold to CA and Hewlett-Packard (HP). He has since designed other systems, such as Ukraine’s digital alert system.

“We created a dashboard for BNN – a back end system that shows all information coming in one place,” he said. “We can source the reliability of the report. It’s partially AI and partially a custom-built system. We receive 1,000 or more reports coming in from our sources on each news item. The system can switch between different languages. We have sources from Gaza, Iran, Iraq. All sourced in order of time, we can see from each report high, low, and moderate reliability.”

The World Economic Forum (WEF) cites concerns over a persistent cost-of-living crisis and the intertwined risks of societal polarization and AI-driven misinformation and disinformation as having dominated the risks outlook for 2024.

“The nexus between falsified information and societal unrest will take center stage amid elections in several major economies that are set to take place in the next two years,” it said in a press release distributed in conjunction with the WEF conference.

Ravner explained, “The new type of threat intelligence is called narrative intelligence. War used to be in the air, on the sea, and on the ground. This is a new front. Israel has won in all fronts but lost bitterly on the information front. There is so much more to be done,” he said, citing the rise of anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism.

Polarization and propaganda

Incendiary tweets and posts are specifically designed to rankle the psyche and cause the outraged reader to react, engage, and share the information on multiple platforms.

Shapira said that today’s technology is designed to create engagement. Social media platforms want us to stay on their platform as long as possible so they can advertise to us.

“It starts with the social media landscape,” the researcher explained. “Algorithms create echo chambers. People interact with others who feel the same way they do. Algorithms are designed to push engagement mechanisms to sell advertising. When there is a polarization in society, there is a cognitive bias, called confirmation bias. We don’t scrutinize data that reinforces what we think about the world: We share it,” Shapira said.

“Not only are algorithms programmed to mirror what a person thinks, but they have also learned how to find a concept that opposes a person’s thinking, a trigger that will make him angry and force him to react.”

Social media algorithms will take an extreme figure on the Right or the Left and place him in news feeds of people who agree or disagree with that person. The metric is all about engagement; machines have learned that anger and hate will inspire engagement, he said.

He pointed out that as people dig into their respective sides, they are pushed to become even more polarized.

The original concept of news, said Shapira, was brought upon us to sell more advertising. Subscriptions couldn’t support publications, so consumers were told that media is balanced and not biased. That way, the media could be bought by and sold to everyone, enabling advertising.

“The media landscape changed,” he said, “when big news outlets discovered that being up front about your agenda has value within the market space, making it harder for unbiased news outlets to survive the economy.”

Countering misinformation

“Don’t take anything for granted,” Brinker’s Ravner cautioned. “Do not get your news from social media. Before you consume news from any source, know that it represents an angle. Acknowledge up front that you don’t know the whole story.”

Mizrach recommended that everyone coordinate with people beyond their echo chamber, and listen to them. “Find at least three different sources that have authority and are well respected and question their sources. Our children are growing up in this world,” and we have to “teach them how to question everything,” the communications adviser and former tech editor said.

“There is no World Book Encyclopedia anymore. Encourage your children to ask for sources. Ask, ‘Whose agenda am I getting here? Whose message am I getting? What assumptions are behind the narratives? Are there counter narratives?’ Explore them.”

BNN’s Moerdler said he declines to put opinions on his newsfeed; therefore, it’s up to the readers to put their own opinions on the news. “If you’re immediately feeling the freak-out within you when you read a news story, step back, do research, and ascertain whether it’s true. Users need to take a second and think, ‘If I share this, how will it affect others?’

“The sad thing, in my view,” Shapira said, “is that as a media consumer, you cannot do anything.”

Once again, we have been given access to the Tree of Knowledge. Whether we choose to properly partake of and share it is a choice to be considered carefully.

Whether you find the news in your feed inspirational, infuriating, or tragic, remember: Whatever lands there has been placed there for a reason. Think about why it’s there, research it thoroughly, and always ask yourself, “Is this true? Is this real? Is there an agenda driving it into my feed?”

And perhaps most importantly, ask yourself, “Should I hit ‘Share’?” Your answer will help to determine whether truth or falsehood is spread in our instantly informed social media world. 