Biden’s Support for Israel Now Comes With Words of Caution

[WellPreserved]

There’s no need to consider maybes here - they’re in actuality just two people who look alike. The video of the boy in the hospital was posted on TikTok in August. The Israeli government’s now-deleted Twitter post was entirely incorrect in claiming that was footage of someone “pretending to be on his deathbed a couple days later”, because unless these conspiracy theorists think “Pallywood” has a time machine, there’s documented proof of one of these people losing their leg well before the October 7 attack, and of one of these people posting these videos of himself to his easily accessible Instagram account, with both legs, currently.

https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/inju ... 023-10-27/

Also the dead Palestinian child whose picture was posted on Israel's official twitter account with the caption "Hamas accidentally posted a video of a doll (yes a doll) suggesting that it was a part of casualties caused by an IDF [Israel Defense Forces] attack." It was shared to Israeli embassy posts in France and Austria and was also included in a post in this forum. The boy was named Omar and was very much real and very much dead.

I think it’s perfectly fair for governments and pro-Israel media/social media to urge caution and critical evaluation of numbers being reported, both since the sources isn’t reliable and since information out of a war zone may need time for details to emerge. But the weird (for lack of a better word) tone of the Pallywood conspiracy theorist stuff that seems almost gleeful in insisting Palestinian suffering must be fake is so gross, and this kind of misinformation from Israeli government sources is only going to erode trust in what they say, which obviously isn’t ideal in any case, but especially not now.

(For the record, just in case anyone was planning to follow up and ask, I think any and all conspiracy theories floating around m about Israelis exaggerating or lying about the horrors and scale of the October 7th attack are obviously false and are disgusting. I just read this and it’s heartbreaking but a look at the fact that both Omar’s and an Israeli little boy named Omer’s deaths became fodder for this kind of denialism: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67206277.amp)
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Social media (especially X formerly known as Twitter) have increasingly become a cesspool of conspiracy theories "backed" by misleading or altered imagery and it's all gross. It think governments and government agencies need to be vigilant about the accuracy of what they post on social media more so now than ever. That being said, many agencies are conducting social media campaigns in the $millions which necessitates hiring third party social media services who may care about number of posts and hits (that's how they get their money) but may care little about accuracy.

How to use the vast reach of social media responsibly can be a conundrum. Unfortunately, it is extremely hard to retract a post once it's viral because many people will believe that if you "lied" before, you maybe lying now so they will choose to believe what they want. Same reason that it's important to for media to get it right the first time rather than getting it wrong and then publishing a retraction.