Social media and Big Tech have helped make truth a casualty of war

In addition, media organizations started repeating ‘official’ statements from various participants in this truly unfortunate conflict without any attempt to first check their veracity independently. Given the news-worthiness of the conflict, news organizations are also under enormous pressure to be the first to release analyses and videos of what is happening on the ground, and as one can expect even in the most pacific of times, the ‘scoop’ is more important than the truth.

A short while after the blast, the health ministry in Gaza claimed that hundreds of people had died in the hospital blast, that there were body parts strewn all over, and that it was an Israeli rocket attack on the hospital that caused the damage. Predictably, news outlets picked up this information and started broadcasting it. For instance, The New York Times (NYT) and Reuters, considered among the most venerable news sources by many, picked up the claim and ran with it. In today’s Big Tech ruled information marketplace, they consequently pushed out alerts to smartphones; NYT’s alert read: “Breaking News: Israeli strike on hospitals kills hundreds, Palestinian officials say."

As can be expected, there are (at least) two sides to every story. Soon after the initial headline blurbs went out, the Israeli military said that it was a misfired rocket by Islamic Jihad, an armed organization that is aligned with Hamas but acts independently. According to Reuters, Islamic Jihad took part in the 7 October terror attack on Israel, and, like Hamas, has continued to launch rockets against Israel since then. The blurbs became (mildly) more neutral, and the NYT alert now said: “500 dead in hospital blast in Gaza, Palestinians say."

Soon after, the official Israeli account on ‘the site formerly known as Twitter’ posted a video that purported to be proof of a misfired rocket shot by Islamic Jihad. The problem? The video bore a time stamp of about 8pm local time, which was a good hour after the blasts had occurred. Interestingly, this discrepancy was noted by an NYT reporter, and most likely led the Israeli account to take down the discredited video while leaving its actual tweet intact.

This isn’t to say that NYT is out to discredit Israel’s official pronouncements on the matter and to side with Palestinians or Hamas. It is indicative of a larger malaise that has hit us, and unlike covid, shows no signs of abating.

Many social media accounts, some run by people with international standing, as also arbiters of the news with large followings in India, pronounced judgments as if they knew everything that had happened on the ground. I would mention them here, but that would not add anything except to show that even these so-called pillars of society have become participants in twisting the truth.

If one now looks up the event on a web-search, one finds competing analyses of what actually happened. Al-Jazeera, the BBC, CNN, and others all have ‘forensic’ arms that took to analyzing the ‘truth’ of what happened. Some of these are the very organizations that rushed to judgment in the first ensuing minutes after the blast. It seems as if in this world of 5-second attention grabbing blurbs, no one sticks by their original words or reports anymore. More importantly, the hospital attack is now old news, so no one is really interested in the truth anymore, whatever it may be.

Elsewhere, Mitt Romney, the respected senior US Republican Senator from Utah, said last month that he will not be seeking re-election. Romney was one of a few Republicans to censure former president Donald Trump and even voted to convict Trump for his role in the attacks on the US Capitol on 6 January 2020. Romney criticized both President Joe Biden and former president Trump, but in a discussion at Georgetown University on 19 October, decried the fact that even respectable news outlets have lost all restraint in their relentless push to be the first out with video footage or a ‘breaking news’ alert sent out as a notification to our phones. This, he says, has led to sound-bite performances becoming the most important part of politics, and that compromise and debate are no longer part of policy-making. He further said: “Our media has moved from where there were editors and fact checkers to where if you are a crackpot with a crazy theory of some kind you’re probably going to get picked up and published where it’s seen by the public at large."

In an interview to The Washington Post, Romney said “People respond to new news. They don’t respond to old news." The Senator was referring to the 6 January insurrection in Washington DC and later allegations that Trump illegally retained classified documents at his Florida golf club home, and to his alleged call to the Georgia secretary of state to “find" enough votes to change the 2020 presidential election results in that state.

Yes, it is true that new news trumps old news every time. Despite good faith attempts by governments and others to reverse the tide, privacy is long dead. And, it would seem, so is the truth.

Siddharth Pai is co-founder of Siana Capital, a venture fund manager.