GAZA-A video of a Hamas gunman firing his assault rifle at a car full of Israeli civilians was viewed more than one million times on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, since it was uploaded Sunday.
A photograph of dead Israeli civilians, strewn across the side of a road in an Israeli kibbutz near the Gaza Strip, has been shared more than 20,000 times on X.And an audio recording of a young Israeli woman’s desperate cries for help as she was being kidnapped from her home has been shared nearly 50,000 times on the platform.
Since Hamas launched a deadly cross-border attack into Israel over the weekend, violent videos and graphic images have flooded social media.
Many of the posts have been seeded by Hamas to terrorize civilians and take advantage of the lack of content moderation on some social media sites-particularly X and Telegram-according to a Hamas official and social media experts interviewed by The New York Times.The strategy mirrors efforts by extremist groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, which took advantage of the lack of guardrails at social media companies years ago to upload graphic footage to the internet. Social media companies reacted then by removing and banning accounts tied to those groups.
The issue has sprouted anew in the past week, particularly on X, where safety and content moderation teams have largely disbanded under Elon Musk’s ownership, and on Telegram, the messaging platform which does virtually no content moderation.