Now, almost the opposite seems true. The war between Hamas and Israel, available for any of us to follow online, has consumed onlookers. Yet for every truthful testimony from those living through it, there is a morass of lies.
What happened? The popular answer is that in the past decade, Silicon Valley’s most prominent platforms have turned from oases into cesspools. As a result, the way we look at these sites has changed, too.
Once upon a time, we believed that social media would deliver the small-t truth: the nitty-gritty facts of any given situation. This wasn’t always wise. The protests in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in 2011 were effectively live-streamed to the world with participant commentary. But researchers say that what reached us thousands of miles away was a mix of rumor and reality. Nonetheless, we gobbled up every dispatch direct from those on the ground. We’d never before tasted that kind of unfiltered information.
Today, we know we were wrong to be so credulous. We look askance at every claim, or at least every claim that doesn’t confirm our priors: the image of a bloodied boy surrounded by Israeli troops that turned out to be a behind-the-scenes frame from a short film; the video of a paraglider slamming into a powerline that in reality was footage of an accident this spring in South Korea; the clips of militants downing helicopters that really derived from the 2013 video game “Arma 3.”
All these have made us into cynics. We’re ready to doubt, and we’re right to doubt — as long as what we are after is still that small-t truth. Perhaps, though, the small-t truth isn’t the only thing we should be searching for.
Think of the explosion at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City on Oct. 17. The masses on social media, as well as many in the mainstream media, including the New York Times, immediately ran with Hamas’s claim that an Israeli missile was the culprit. By the end of the next day, they’d backtracked.
An analysis last week from The Post identifies a barrage of rockets launched by fighters in Gaza toward the hospital 44 seconds before the explosion. And while a look by the New York Times casts a crucial piece of evidence for this view into question, neither does the investigation blame an Israeli strike.
You might say this is yet another moment when online platforms allowed a falsehood to flourish — and you’d be right. Yet it is easy to understand why those on the ground did blame an Israeli strike to start with.
This month, Israel has launched more than 7,000 munitions into Gaza. Three days before the mystery explosion, an Israeli artillery shell did hit the hospital — but it was an illumination shell that did only minor damage. Also, 22 hospitals treating more than 2,000 patients had been warned to evacuate for precisely the reason that they might be in the line of fire. Those living under siege watch as their homes are leveled by missiles or their loved ones killed by missiles. No wonder that when they hear of more carnage, they think one of those missiles is responsible.
A viral tale on the other side of things offers a matching lesson: the apocryphal beheaded babies at the Kfar Azza kibbutz. President Biden was only the most prominent of many political and social leaders to repeat the ricocheting claim that Hamas terrorists had decapitated infants — only for his aides to recant after closer examination revealed that, at least as far anyone can prove, the terrorists had not decapitated infants after all.
Yet they had decapitated men and women. And they had killed babies. The frenzied discussion over whether Hamas had been defamed by those accusing it of beheading infants when it had merely shot those infants read almost as surrealism. Yes, the claim was, technically, false. But was it emotionally false? What about morally?
Even in our era of skepticism toward everything we see online, most people seem to hope that, with the right interventions, we can rely on the web to catalog the facts as they come in — and chronicle them for posterity. And social media can still sometimes help with that project, by bringing to light stories that might otherwise have been buried; think, for instance, of the murder of George Floyd.
But especially in moments of crisis, amid the fog of war, much of the time, small-t truth isn’t what we’re going to get. What we will almost always find instead is messier: an angle on the world not as it literally is but as people feel it is. Israel bombed the hospital. Hamas beheaded babies.
This state of affairs is admittedly unfortunate for clearing up controversies or rebuilding a shared reality. The upside is that the sort of emotional and moral big-T Truth that the internet can broadcast around the world could go some way toward building more empathy. Platforms that allow for real-time sharing, with no editing and little vetting, allow us to witness the raw emotions of people far away as those people experience them — or of people close by but unlike us in background or perspective.
Bouazizi, the man on fire in Tunisia, was initially said to be a college graduate reduced to selling fruit and then robbed of that, too. Eventually, it was discovered that he hadn’t gone to college and might not have finished high school. Does it matter? He still set himself aflame.
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