Social media has never felt more dangerous

• Social media should, by now, be a more reliable place to follow world events.
• Trying to keep afloat of events in Israel proves otherwise.

Over the course of the last two days, millions have witnessed the Middle East's most sensitive conflict take its latest violent turn through social media.

As Hamas fighters crossed the border into Israel on Saturday, prompting Israeli forces to respond with air strikes on Gaza, social media had a clear function to play: Give people access to real-time, accurate information.

This function is especially important when it involves a complex conflict as historic, violent, and consequential as that between Israel and Hamas.

Yet X in particular remains rife with misinformation and vitriol, even as owner Elon Musk pushes the platform as the bastion of citizen journalism, where users post unfiltered, accurate reporting without involving professional journalists.

Shayan Sardarizadeh, a journalist specializing in disinformation at BBC Monitoring, lamented how "the deluge of false posts in the last two days" has been "something else."

Some of the worst offenders are those who pay for visibility and verification through Twitter Blue, now known as X Premium.

Take this post from Mario Nawfal, a verified user with almost 1 million followers. It purports to show a video of rockets "fired by Hamas from the Gaza Strip towards Israel." It's actually footage from the Syrian War posted online in 2020, per Sardarizadeh and a Community Notes response to the post.

Despite Nawfal's post being proven false, it remains public as of time of publishing.

Others are misleadingly repurposing content from other platforms.

A video posted to TikTok in 2021 of a march in support of Palestinian rights in Chicago was reposted to X with claims that the march was happening "in Chicago now."

One reason might be perverse incentives.

Since July, users signed up to the subscription service have been promised a financial cut of revenue generated from ads appearing among replies to their posts. That may be incentivizing posters to maximize engagement at the expense of truth.

Elon Musk isn't helping. The billionaire directed his 159 million X followers to two social-media accounts that previously posted fake news. When he first took over the platform almost a year ago, one of his first actions was to fire most of the staff who moderate for misinformation and harmful content.

X is almost 20 years old, older than some of the media outlets covering the conflict right now. The vitriol and inaccurate information posted on the platform through the weekend show the site is far away from achieving Elon Musk's dream of disintermediated "citizen journalism."