X, a social media platform with an estimated 619 million active users worldwide, remains a primary source of disinformation about the Israel-Hamas war.
On February 12, Israel launched airstrikes in Rafah, a city in the southern portion of the Gaza Strip that borders Egypt, as part of a raid to conduct what Israel called a successful rescue operation.
Palestine TV, the Palestinian Authority's official television station in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said 74 Palestinians were killed during the operation, Reuters reported.
The United States is involved in negotiations in Cairo, Egypt, to secure a ceasefire amid concerns Israel will launch a broader assault on the city.
Aid groups warn that an Israeli incursion into Rafah, where over half of Gaza’s Palestinian population currently resides, could be catastrophic.
Children have been injured or killed in the strikes on Rafah, or orphaned as a result of other Israeli military operations.
That has not stopped social media users from recycling old and unrelated footage of children in difficult circumstances to shape perceptions about the Israel-Hamas conflict.
On February 11, Angelo Giuliano or angeloinchina, a blue-checked X user with 182.5k followers, shared an image of a young child dressed in red, sitting on the street, back against a wall, with their eyes closed. A man comes up and taps the child on the face, until the child opens their eyes.
Giuliano’s comment reads:
“Rafah Today.”
The post went viral, having received over 4 million views, 44K reposts and 73K likes at the time of writing.
However, the image has nothing to do with the current situation in Rafah. It was posted online months before hostilities erupted there in October of last year.
The video used in Giuliano’s post was from TikTok, and includes a superimposed caption: “Palestinian orphans abandoned lonely.”
That video, in turn, has two watermarks from Instagram. One is to Kahraman Tazeoglu, a Turkish internet personality with 856K Instagram followers.
Tazeoglu posted the video to Instagram in December 2023. The caption in Turkish at the top reads: “children should sleep at home.”
However, the second caption by Tazeoglu, in the lower portion of the screen, is covered up in the video shared by Giuliano. That caption, accompanied by emojis, reads: “Little Happiness.” There is no mention of Palestinian orphans.
Tazeoglu was not the first to share the video.
The second watermark is for rojhalat_kurd1, a blogger with 349k Instagram followers. Rojhalat or Rojhelat is a term used by Kurds to refer to the Kurdish regions of Iran in the country’s northwest.
Rojhalat_kurd1 originally shared the video on May 17, 2023.
Rojhalat_kurd1 commented on the video, writing “Dear mother” in Persian, with three crying emojis. There is no other information posted on the video indicating where or when it was first shot.
While most of the comments in Persian are messages of sympathy, a few have political undertones, tying the child’s assumed poverty to the political situation in Iran, or the struggle of minorities in the country.
Polygraph.info reached out to Rojhalat_kurd1 for more information about where the video was filmed, but had not heard back at the time of publication.
While Polygraph.info could not determine the exact date or location of where the video was shot, Rojhalat_kurd1 did post it to Instagram over four and a half months before the Palestinian group Hamas attacked Israeli towns and settlements near the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians. That precipitated Israel’s military operation against Hamas, and the growing humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.
Giuliano’s post exemplifies the problem with disinformation on X since the Israel-Hamas war began.
Based in China, Giuliano is a self-described opponent of imperialism. He has appeared on Russian and Chinese state media, and regularly shares views sympathetic to their state interests. He also regularly posts anti-Israeli, anti-Western content. Giuliano claims to have regularly been among the 1,000 most viral and/or influential X accounts, garnering over 2 million views a day.
As Polygraph.info previously reported, social media networks have been flooded with recycled footage to support false, misleading or otherwise unsubstantiated narratives about the Israel-Hamas war since hostilities erupted.
Polygraph.info has documented many such cases, including multiple attempts to pass off footage and images from the war in Syria, an Indian navy missile test, militant activity in the Philippines, Azerbaijan detaining Karabakh leaders in a disputed territory, and other repurposed footage, as coming from the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Studies indicate X has been a main platform for such disinformation to be disseminated.
Spreaders of such disinformation are not necessarily motivated by state interests or political ideology.
Subscribers to X Premium have a financial incentive to spread posts that go viral, including disinformation. That’s because blue-checked users are eligible for ad revenue sharing if they have 500 followers and have generated five million impressions in the preceding three months.
In a January report, the European Fact-Checking Standards Network Project, a consortium of fact-checking and open-source intelligence (OSINT) organizations across Europe, said that X, formally known as Twitter, ranked “worst” in its efforts to fight disinformation.
That report said not a single fact-checking organization surveyed considers X “to take disinformation seriously.”
“The only initiative in place to address disinformation seems to be Community Notes,” the report said.
“This community-driven model does not include any professional or methodological review and, by assigning more weight to users who are more ‘diligent about vetting details of notes,' is open to manipulation and has been exploited to even display debunked disinformation in the notes themselves.”
No community note had been put on Giuliano’s post at the time of writing.
