how Gaza has changed social media

Nobody knows if and how the tragedy in Gaza will end, but we know very well how it began on social networks immediately after the massacre on October 7, 2023 which caused the death of 859 Israeli civilians and the seizure of 251 hostages, triggering a military reprisal which immediately became the extermination of a people, or whatever you want to call it. The most photographed and documented invasion in the history of humanity began with a fake, or rather with a series of fakes. In the hours immediately following the Hamas terrorist attack and while the ground invasion of the Israeli Armed Forces (IDF) was being prepared, scenes of a firefight taken from a video game and passed off as real images were posted on Twitter/X and reshared and commented on; a celebration with fireworks in Algeria passed off as a bombing of a Palestinian town; a video of the war in Syria from three years earlier replayed as if it had just been shot in Gaza; another of “an Israeli general captured by Hamas”, seen almost two million times before it was ascertained that the episode was very old and that the protagonist was a separatist fighter from Azerbaijan; finally, a photo of Cristiano Ronaldo with the Palestinian flag (but he was instead a Moroccan footballer at the 2022 World Cup).

In the first two days X literally came overwhelmed by misinformation to the point that the CEO Linda Iaccarino canceled all public commitments to take care – she said – “of the security of the platform”; while the small team left to moderate the content put out a note to let it be known that they were literally “doing everything possible.” For example, they said, they had suspended a fake Jerusalem Post profile that claimed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in hospital. Too late, too little. C

let’s say it: not that there weren’t attempts at misinformation on Twitter before. They have always been there. But now on X it is practically impossible to contain them for two rather obvious reasons. The first is that the team that moderated the content, deleting the violent or obviously false ones, it was decimated immediately after the arrival of Elon Musk and partly replaced by unlikely known communities, a kind of self-management in which a majority decides, in the comments on a post, whether something is true or false (like Pontius Pilate asking the crowd: do you want to save Barabbas or Jesus? In short, it’s the truth. of the facts by show of hands). The second is that certified users, those who can be trusted one hundred percent, those with the famous “blue check” next to the profile photo, they are no longer the truly authoritative ones, such as heads of government, Nobel prize winners, major international newspapers; but those who pay 8 dollars a month. Do you want to peddle lies or rambling opinions but be rewarded by the X algorithm and be seen by millions of people? Buy the blue check, it’s on sale. Social credibility costs less than thirty cents a day. But how much is it worth?

X has thus become like a square without policemen and without traffic lights, a place where if you don’t want to be hit by crazy cars you’d better get out of the way and do it quickly. And the other social networks, after Donald Trump’s victory and the end of the essentially useless practice of fact checking, were not much better. But there was another possibility. Yes, of course, closing your profile, or muting it, and starting to post elsewhere, perhaps, on Mastodon, even if there is practically no one there, can give the illusion of doing the right thing. And, as we have seen, it is not a bad choice in itself. Indeed, it was and remains something even sensible, coherent, reassuring: in the sense that it reassures us, makes us feel better, on the right side of history. It makes us proudly say phrases like: “I don’t participate in a fixed match”; or «Go back to the algorithm». But it was and remains a fundamentally ineffective choice: it doesn’t really change things. In fact, it doesn’t even make a scratch on the owners of the digital platforms and their respective associates.

As demonstrated, on the contrary, by the dramatic story of Gaza which enters into this story because – however it ends – it was the demonstration that, despite everything, it is still possible to use social networks against poweruse them to defend a cause deemed just and urgent that others have done everything to obscure; use them – without being used by them anymore – not just to say no, which is sometimes the first step to take anyway; but to organize, if not a revolution, then some form of resistance. And in this way beat artificial intelligence algorithms that have been working for years they decide what we see and what we don’t.

The global mobilization for Gaza was the largest episode of mass insubordination in history, the moment in which millions of people at a certain point said to those in charge: anything goes, we put you through everything, greed, greed, arrogance and superficiality, but enough is enough. And they did it not by boycotting social networks but thanks to social networks. In fact, only thanks to the internet has the tragedy of Gaza become the battle of this generation of young people, the so-called Gen Z. Just as Vietnam and civil rights were for the baby boomers; the fall of the Wall and the end of apartheid for Generation X; and climate change for Millennials. Of course, schematizations always lose something. They simplify. But there is no doubt that Gaza and the Palestinian cause in the course of 2024 have suddenly, unpredictably become the flag of millions of kids. Their way of saying that not only does Palestine exist, “must exist”, but they also exist: they have a head, a heart and in the face of endless horror they have decided to Don’t look the other way. In all this there will also be excesses and naivety, indeed, there is no doubt that there are: but doesn’t it seem wonderful that young people are mobilizing not for a new model of sneakers or for a watch seen in an influencer’s video on TikTok but for what the professor Marco Tedescowho teaches at Columbia University, one of the epicenters of the ProPal campus protests in the United States, called it simply “a sense of humanity”? Isn’t that what we wanted from them? That they showed up alive? Well, they did, they’re doing it. In short, as always in the history of humanity, it was young people who showed us the route. And this is not just a widespread feeling.