Author: CounterPoint (Page 2 of 11)

The Rise of the Christofascists

October 29, 2023 / CounterPoint

Christian fascism is a term that is used to describe a far-right political ideology that denotes an intersection between fascism and Christianity. It is sometimes referred to as “Christofascism“, a neologism that was coined in 1970 by the liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle.^[1]^[2]^[3]

Interpretation of Sölle

Tom F. Driver, the Paul Tillich Professor Emeritus at Union Theological Seminary, expressed concern “that the worship of God in Christ not divide Christian from Jew, man from woman, clergy from laity, white from black, or rich from poor”. To him, Christianity is in constant danger of Christofascism. He stated that “[w]e fear Christofascism, which we see as the political direction of all attempts to place Christ at the center of social life and history” and that “[m]uch of the churches’ teaching about Christ has turned into something that is dictatorial in its heart and is preparing society for an American fascism”.^[4]^[5]

Christofascism “disposed or allowed Christians, to impose themselves not only upon other religions but other cultures, and political parties which do not march under the banner of the final, normative, victorious Christ” – as Paul F. Knitter describes Sölle’s view.^[6]^[7]

Donald Trump is greeted by Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) on February 4, 2020.
Leah Millis / Getty

The most dangerous movement in American politics today is not Trumpism. It is Christofascism. With the election of Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, the organized effort to impose the extreme religious views of a minority of Americans on the entire country, at the expense of many of our most basic freedoms, took a disturbing step forward.

Despite Speaker Johnson’s claims of being a constitutional “originalist,” via his elevation by a unanimous vote of his Republican colleagues, he has moved America closer to having precisely the kind of government America’s founders most feared.

There is a reason the word “God” does not appear a single time in the Constitution. The founders were breaking with an England and Europe that were still in the thrall of the idea that rulers derived their powers from heaven above, “the divine right of kings.” But the Constitution explicitly states their view that the powers of government are derived “from the consent of the governed.”

Thomas Jefferson said he viewed with “solemn reverence that act of the whole of the American people” which established “a wall of separation between church and state.” George Washington approved a treaty stating, “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” The First Amendment in America’s Bill of Rights states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The principal author of the Constitution, James Madison, in his treatise, “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” described 15 reasons why the U.S. government must avoid backing any religion.

Source:

Here’s Why Mike Johnson Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump

Speaker Mike Johnson Believes God Has Ordained Him

October 28, 2023 / CounterPoint

Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t hide his religion or his belief in the primacy of his Christian beliefs. Quite the contrary. Here’s what he told Sean Hannity Thursday on Fox News: “Someone asked me today in the media, ‘People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview. That’s what I believe.’”

This came the day after he used his precious first remarks as speaker to tell the House and the country that he believes God has ordained him. “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority…I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment in this time.’”

(He also introduced his “dedicated wife of 25 years” to the nation—and her absence at his acceptance speech—like this: “She’s spent the last couple of weeks on her knees in prayer to the Lord. And, um, she’s a little worn out.”)

Surely, then, when asked about the mass shooting in Maine, this would be a chance for him to speak out against the most sacred commandment—Thou shalt not kill—and use his new divinely ordained power to speak to the need to address the availability of weapons that make murder possible on a quick and massive scale. Right? Nope.

“The problem is the human heart,” he told Hannity. “It’s not guns. It’s not the weapons. At the end of the day we have to protect the right of the citizens to protect themselves and that’s the Second Amendment…This is not the time to talk about legislation.”

Mike Johnson is now second in line to the presidency.

Source:

What Do You Hear When the New House Speaker Says He’s Been Ordained By God?

Good News

October 27, 2023 / CounterPoint

https://americansofconscience.com/

Work for justice, but pause to celebrate

We are aware that atrocious, inhumane events are happening both at home and abroad. Because of this, though celebration may seem superficial, it is crucial to recognize that our efforts are leading to the change we seek. While we work for justice, let us also pause to acknowledge the considerable good that pervades our goals and communities.

Celebrate good news

The Supreme Court of the U.S. upholds the rights of whistleblowers.
People seeking asylum in the U.S. can receive work permits that are valid for five years instead of the previous two-year limit.
Half a million children and families who were inappropriately disenrolled from Medicaid and CHIP regain coverage.
Laphonza Butler is sworn into the Senate, becoming the first Black lesbian to openly serve in Congress and the first openly LGBTQ+ person to represent CA in the Senate.
CA creates a statewide alert system to help locate and bring attention to missing Black children and young adults.
CA’s high school students will learn about labor rights and protections.
CT: LGBTQ people who use state health plans can now access equal fertility-related coverage to start a family.
FL: A court rules that the state’s proposed redistricting plan violates the FL constitution.
MI: Civil rights lawyer Susan DeClercq is confirmed as judge to the Eastern District, becoming the first person of East Asian descent to serve as a lifetime judge in the state.
NJ’s pharmacies will offer over-the-counter birth control starting in early 2024.
Chicago eliminates subminimum wage for tipped workers.
Costco members can now access low-cost healthcare.
Planned Parenthood Pasadena expands medication-abortion access for Californians through telehealth services.
As part of their Make Our Voices Heard campaign, Immigrant ARC curates blog posts for current issues in immigration and associated legal services.
Disney VFX workers vote to unionize with IATSE, becoming only the second-ever visual effects team to do so.
Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman are awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work on research leading to the creation of mRNA vaccines.
Mauritius decriminalizes same-sex relations.
An alliance of 45 countries pledge to raise $12B to protect coral reefs.

Support the good news list

Some very special people help make our lists of good news and positive actions possible. Thank you, patrons! Join them to get the good news a week early! Learn more here.

Gratefully,

— Jen Hofmann and the AoCC team

Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again.

October 25, 2023 / CounterPoint

Plastic is cheap to make and shockingly profitable. It’s everywhere. And we’re all paying the price.

Plastic, and the profusion of waste it creates, can hide in plain sight, a ubiquitous part of our lives we rarely question. But a closer examination of the situation can be shocking.

Currently, about 430 million tons of plastic is produced yearly, according to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)—significantly more than the weight of all human beings combined. One-third of this total takes the form of single-use plastics, which humans interact with for seconds or minutes before discarding.

“The amount of plastic on our planet—it’s like one big oil spill.”

https://counterpoint.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/the-new-plastics-economy.pdf

A total of 95% of the plastic used in packaging is disposed of after one use, a loss to the economy of up to $120 billion annually, concludes a report by McKinsey. (Just over a quarter of all plastics are used for packaging.) One-third of this packaging is not collected, becoming pollution that generates “significant economic costs by reducing the productivity of vital natural systems such as the ocean.” This causes at least $40 billion in damages, the report states, which exceeds the “profit pool” of the packaging industry. One paper estimated that the average person consumes five grams of plastic every week—mostly from water. About 95% of the tap water in the United States is contaminated. Microplastics are also widely found in beer, salt, shellfish, and other human foods.

In the United States, only about 5% to 6% of plastics are being recycled each year.

Notably, what doesn’t get reused or recycled does not chemically degrade but rather becomes a fixture of our world; it breaks apart to form microplastics, pieces smaller than five millimeters in diameter. In the past few years, scientists have found significant quantities of microplastics in the further reaches of the ocean; in snow and rainfall in seemingly pristine places worldwide; in the air we breathe; and in human blood, colons, lungs, veins, breast milk, placentas, and fetuses.

The solution to that problem lies further upstream: to address plastic pollution, those who produce plastics need to pay for the damage it causes, and the world will also have to make less of it. We’ll have to develop better, more recyclable products. We’ll also have to find sustainable alternatives and increase what ecologists call circularity—keeping those products in use as long as possible and finding ways to reuse their materials after that.

Source:

Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again.

How Social Media Abdicated Responsibility for the News

October 24, 2023 / CounterPoint

X, formerly known as Twitter, has, under the ownership of Elon Musk, dismantled its content-moderation staff, throttled the reach of news publications, and allowed any user to buy blue-check verification, turning what was once considered a badge of trustworthiness on the platform into a signal of support for Musk’s regime. Meta’s Facebook has minimized the number of news articles in users’ feeds, following years of controversy over the company’s role in spreading misinformation. And TikTok, under increased scrutiny in the United States for its parent company’s relationship with the Chinese government, is distancing itself from news content. A little over a decade ago, social media was heralded as a tool of transparency on a global scale for its ability to distribute on-the-ground documentation during the uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring. Now the same platforms appear to be making conflicts hazier rather than clearer. In the days since Hamas’s attacks, we’ve seen with fresh urgency the perils of relying on our feeds for news updates.

An “algorithmically driven fog of war” is how one journalist described the deluge of disinformation and mislabelled footage on X. Videos from a paragliding accident in South Korea in June of this year, the Syrian civil war in 2014, and a combat video game called Arma 3 have all been falsely labeled as scenes from Israel or Gaza. (Inquiries I sent to X were met with an e-mail reading, “Busy now, please check back later.”) On October 8th, Musk posted a tweet recommending two accounts to follow for information on the conflict, @WarMonitors and @sentdefender, neither of which is a formal media company, but both are paid X subscribers. Later that day, after users pointed out that both accounts regularly post falsities, Musk deleted the recommendation. Where Twitter was once one of the better-moderated digital platforms, X is most trustworthy as a source for finding out what its owner wants you to see.

https://www.factcheck.org/2023/10/posts-use-fabricated-audio-to-misrepresent-cnn-report-during-rocket-attack-in-israel/

Facebook used to aggregate content in a “News Feed” and pay media companies to publish stories on its platform. But after years of complicity in disseminating Trumpian lies—about the 2016 election, the COVID pandemic, and the January 6th riots—the company has performed an about-face. Whether because of negative public opinion or because of the threat of regulation, it’s clear that promoting news is no longer the goal of any of Meta’s social media. In recent days, my Facebook feed has been overrun with the same spammy entertainment-industry memes that have proliferated on the platform, as if nothing noteworthy were happening in the world beyond. On Instagram, some pro-Palestine users complained of being “shadowbanned”—seemingly cut off without warning from algorithmic promotion—and shared tips for getting around it. (Meta attributed the problem to a “bug.”)

Our feeds continue to create a feeling of transparency and granularity, while providing fewer of the signposts that we need to chart a clear path through the thicket of content. What remains, perhaps aptly, is an atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty as war unfolds daily on our screens.

In July, Meta launched its newest social network, Threads, in an attempt to draw users away from Musk’s embattled X. But, unlike X, Threads has shied away from serving as a real-time news aggregator. Last week, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram and overseer of Threads, announced that the platform was “not going to get in the way of” news content but was “not going go [sic] to amplify” it, either. He continued, “To do so would be too risky given the maturity of the platform, the downsides of over-promising, and the stakes.” I’ve found Threads more useful than X as a source for news about the Israel-Hamas war. The mood is calmer and more deliberate, and my feed tends to highlight posts that have already drawn engagement from authoritative voices. But I’ve also seen plenty of journalists on Threads griping that they were getting too many algorithmic recommendations and insufficient real-time posts. Users of Threads now have the option to switch to a chronologically organized feed. But on the default setting that most people use, there is no guarantee that the platform is showing you the latest information at any given time.

More Info: Websites for Fact-Checking

Source:

How Social Media Abdicated Responsibility for the News

Good news

October 23, 2023 / CounterPoint

https://americansofconscience.com/

Here at CounterPoint, we sort through the 24/7 fire hose of news to try to bring attention to under-heard voices of reason. We’ll continue to do that, but it’s just as important to celebrate good news whenever we can. We’re so grateful to activist Jennifer Hofmann and her Americans of Conscience volunteers for their dedication to turning bad news into positive action.

Here’s a recent sample:

People from South Sudan and Cameroon living in the U.S. can remain without threat of deportation for an additional 18 months.
The U.S. government is not allowed to separate families entering the country under so-called “zero tolerance” policies, and families separated under the previous administration can apply for parole, work permits, and a special asylum process.
In an effort to acknowledge historical harm, researchers investigate the forced assimilation of Indigenous children in present-day Colorado.
SCOTUS upholds the Executive Branch’s authority to narrow the focus of immigration enforcement from the broad terms of the previous administration.
AL’s new, more fair congressional map is approved by SCOTUS.
NV improves ballot access for disabled voters, incarcerated voters, and residents of Native American reservations.
The manufacturers of all ten drugs selected under the IRA’s Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program sign agreements to participate in the program.
SCOTUS declines to hear a challenge to NY’s rent-control law, likely preserving it and preventing rate hikes.
President Biden issues a proclamation to observe Oct. 9, 2023 as Indigenous Peoples Day.
CA Attorney General Rob Bonta sues anti-abortion pregnancy centers over false advertising of unethical procedures.
CA: With the aim of creating data-driven safety solutions, the state requires transit agencies to survey riders on their experiences with harassment.
CO prohibits family courts from ordering children to participate in “reunification programs” that isolate them from a trusted caregiver.
CT’s law banning the open carrying of firearms and implementing other gun safety measures goes into effect.
GA will remain a member of the interstate election compact ERIC.
MN residents can now apply for driver’s licenses regardless of immigration status.
The San Diego and Los Angeles County public libraries join the Books Unbanned initiative.
Princeton University offers free tuition and room and board for most students from families earning less than $100,000.
Abortion rights organization Free & Just uses billboards and sky banners to spread the word that NE residents are being jailed under the state’s abortion ban.
The bipartisan election integrity group Keep Our Republic expands into WI.
The Catholic Legal Immigration Network launches “Neighbors, Not Strangers,” a storytelling initiative highlighting that newcomers to the U.S. are community members to be welcomed.
Nearly 70 countries at the United Nations sign a treaty to protect international seas.
Narges Mohammadi is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy for the rights of women in Iran and for human rights and freedom for all.
Pope Francis calls for world leaders to take bold steps to reverse climate change.
Thanks to conservation efforts, global rhinoceros numbers increase to 27,000.

Jim Jordan tried to help Trump mount a coup. Now he gets to be speaker?

October 14, 2023 / CounterPoint

In pictures: The January 6 Capitol riot https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/03/politics/gallery/january-6-capitol-insurrection/index.html

In pictures: The January 6 Capitol riot | Shay Horse/NurPhoto/Getty Images https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/03/politics/gallery/january-6-capitol-insurrection/index.html

Jordan is not an outlier in the House GOP cosmos. His pugilistic advocacy of phony Trump narratives—the 2020 election was rigged; there was no Russian attack on the 2016 election; Trump did nothing wrong when he pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to dig up dirt on Joe Biden; the current prosecutions of Trump are Deep State plots—is in sync with the positions expressed by most House Republicans. Yet in one area, Jordan has distinguished himself: He was one of the small number of House GOP members who actively schemed with Trump to overturn the results of the last presidential election.

On January 6—a day of violent chaos and insurrection—Jordan spoke with Trump by phone at least twice. As the committee noted, Jordan “has provided inconsistent public statements about how many times they spoke and what they discussed.” That day Jordan also received five calls from Giuliani, and the two connected at least twice in the evening, as Giuliani was attempting to encourage members of Congress to continue objecting to Biden’s electoral votes. In the days after January 6, Jordan spoke with Trump White House staff about the prospect of presidential pardons for members of Congress.

Days after the November election, he spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally in front of the Pennsylvania state Capitol. He spread election conspiracy theories within right-wing media. He endorsed Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell’s bogus claims that Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic had robbed Trump of electoral victory. He called for a congressional investigation of electoral fraud for which there was no evidence and demanded a special counsel be appointed. He endorsed state legislatures canceling vote tallies and selecting their own presidential electors. He urged Trump not to concede. He demanded Congress not certify Joe Biden’s victory in the ceremony scheduled for January 6, 2021.

When Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said to Trump that the Justice Department couldn’t “snap its fingers and change the outcome of the election,” Trump responded, “I don’t expect you to do that. Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen.”

Many Republicans endorsed Trump’s Big Lie about the election. But Jordan was one of only a handful of congressional Republicans who actively conspired with Trump to overturn the election results. As he runs for House speaker, Republicans appear eager to ignore that. Yet by embracing Jordan, they tie themselves further to that attack on democracy and the Constitution.

Source:

Jim Jordan tried to help Trump mount a coup. Now he gets to be speaker?

Go, Iris Mogul!

October 13, 2023 / CounterPoint

Iris Mogul, a high school student who started a banned books club, is photographed with one of her favorite books during the “Walk for Freadom” kickoff event on Sunday, October 1, 2023, in Coral Gables, Florida. The march began at the Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ and ended at Books & Books. Carl Juste cjuste@miamiherald.com

Since she was little, Iris Mogul has always loved reading.

When The 16-year-old junior at the Academy Academy for Advanced Academics in South Florida learned that her English teacher was considering not teaching a Toni Morrison book because of the state’s political environment, she decided to start a banned book club.

There were 300 books removed from Florida schools last year, according to a list released by the Florida Department of Education. Nationally, the American Library Association found that the number of books facing challenges for censorship is up 20 percent for the first eight months of this year compared to 2022. That includes more than 800 books in school districts across 37 states.

“It was kind of like a double whammy because it’s like an act of resistance… and it’s a way to start a book club and talk to people,” said Mogul, a student in a dual enrollment program at Florida International University. As part of Florida’s expanded “Parental Rights in Education” law, one parent or community member can object to instructional material or a school library book. The law, signed in May, requires the book or materials to be removed within five days of the objection and remain unavailable to students until the issue is resolved. More books were pulled from shelves in Florida public schools than in any other state last school year.

With everything that’s going on in the world right now, we really appreciate being able to share a bit of positive news…

The Biden administration approves $9B in student loan debt forgiveness for nearly 126,000 borrowers.
The Biden administration takes actions to promote educational opportunity for students of diverse backgrounds in colleges and universities.
People from Afghanistan living in the U.S. can remain without threat of deportation through May 2025.
USCIS directs agency employees to provide access to voter registration services for new citizens during naturalization ceremonies.
The DOT invests in over 1,700 U.S.-built buses, nearly half of which will be zero-emission models.
CA’s Supreme Court overturns decades of rulings shielding police from lawsuits, broadening the right to seek damages for abusive police conduct.
CT launches a “baby bonds” program to address systemic poverty.
IL allocates $1M in funding for job assistance for the state’s tradeswomen.
NJ requires employers with at least 50 workers to include abortion coverage in employee health plans.
TX eliminates sales tax on menstrual products and certain baby care items.
29 states and Washington, DC have enacted a total of 70 laws that expand voting access.
A court upholds NYC’s $18/hour minimum wage for food delivery workers.
The Haudenosaunee Nationals lacrosse team reclaim their proper name.
Iris Mogul, 16, starts a book club for her community to read and discuss books censored by the state.
The Raleigh, NC café A Place at the Table offers a pay-what-you-can menu.
NYC Health + Hospitals reduces their food-related carbon emissions by 36 percent within a year by primarily serving plant-based meals.
Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court bars the country’s former president from running for office for eight years due to his false claims about the integrity of the nation’s voting systems.

Did Facebook enable global political manipulation?

October 12, 2023 / CounterPoint

Listen to the story:

When Sophie Zhang went public with explosive revelations detailing the political manipulation she’d uncovered during her time as a data scientist at Facebook, she supplied concrete evidence to support what critics had long been saying on the outside: that Facebook makes election interference easy, and that unless such activity hurts the company’s business interests, it can’t be bothered to fix the problem.

On her last day, hours after she posted her memo internally, Facebook deleted it (though they later restored an edited version after widespread employee anger). A few hours later, an HR person called her, asking her to also remove a password-protected copy she had posted on her personal website. She tried to bargain: she would do so if they restored the internal version. The next day, instead, she received a notice from her hosting server that it had taken down her entire website after a complaint from Facebook. A few days after that, it took down her domain as well.

These are some of the biggest revelations in Zhang’s memo:

It took Facebook’s leaders nine months to act on a coordinated campaign “that used thousands of inauthentic assets to boost President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on a massive scale to mislead the Honduran people.” Two weeks after Facebook took action against the perpetrators in July, they returned, leading to a game of “whack-a-mole” between Zhang and the operatives behind the fake accounts, which are still active.
In Azerbaijan, Zhang discovered the ruling political party “utilized thousands of inauthentic assets… to harass the opposition en masse.” Facebook began looking into the issue a year after Zhang reported it. The investigation is ongoing.
Zhang and her colleagues removed “10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high-profile politicians in Brazil and the US in the 2018 elections.”
In February 2019, a NATO researcher informed Facebook that “he’d obtained Russian inauthentic activity on a high-profile U.S. political figure that we didn’t catch.” Zhang removed the activity, “dousing the immediate fire,” she wrote.
In Ukraine, Zhang “found inauthentic scripted activity” supporting both former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a pro–European Union politician and former presidential candidate, as well as Volodymyr Groysman, a former prime minister and ally of former president Petro Poroshenko. “Volodymyr Zelensky and his faction was the only major group not affected,” Zhang said of the current Ukrainian president.
Zhang discovered inauthentic activity — a Facebook term for engagement from bot accounts and coordinated manual accounts— in Bolivia and Ecuador but chose “not to prioritize it,” due to her workload. The amount of power she had as a mid-level employee to make decisions about a country’s political outcomes took a toll on her health.
After becoming aware of coordinated manipulation on the Spanish Health Ministry’s Facebook page during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhang helped find and remove 672,000 fake accounts “acting on similar targets globally” including in the US.
In India, she worked to remove “a politically sophisticated network of more than a thousand actors working to influence” the local elections taking place in Delhi in February. Facebook never publicly disclosed this network or that it had taken it down.

By speaking out and eschewing anonymity, Zhang risked legal action from the company, harm to her future career prospects, and perhaps even reprisals. Her story reveals that it is really pure luck that we now know so much about how Facebook enables election interference globally. To regulators around the world considering how to rein in the company, this should be a wake-up call.

She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story.

Social Media is a (Largely) Lawless Cesspool

October 11, 2023 / CounterPoint

Governments from Pakistan to Mexico to Washington are woefully unequipped to combat disinformation warfare. Eastern European countries living in Russia’s shadow can teach us how to start fighting back, but only if our politicians decide to stop profiting from these tactics and fight them instead.

Suzanne Smalley
October 10th, 2023

A screenshot from a video shared widely on social media purporting to show a Hamas fighter downing a helicopter, which is actually pulled from the video game Arma 3.

Video game clips purporting to be footage of a Hamas fighter shooting down an Israeli helicopter. Phony X accounts spreading fake news through fictitious BBC and Jerusalem Post “journalists.” An Algerian fireworks celebration is described as Israeli strikes.

These are just a few examples of the disinformation swirling around the conflict between Hamas and Israel, much of which has been enabled by X, formerly known as Twitter, and by platforms like Meta and Telegram.

The platforms have also been used to terrorize. In one instance, a girl found out that a militant had killed her grandmother after he broadcast it on a Facebook livestream. Meta did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

X owner Elon Musk promoted two particularly virulent accounts spreading disinformation in a post that was viewed 11 million times before Musk deleted the tweet a few hours later.

One of those accounts, @sentdefender, was described by Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFR) expert Emerson Brooking as both “absolutely poisonous” and often retweeted “uncritically.”

X removed some of the most blatantly fake tweets, often hours after they were posted, but purveyors of disinformation like @sentdefender still operate freely.

A spokesperson for X replied to a request for comment by saying to “check back later.”

The platform announced changes to its public interest policy over the weekend, according to a post on its safety channel. The post said X has seen an increase in “daily active users” based in the conflict area in the past few days and that more than 50 million posts worldwide have discussed the attack.

The use of video game and recycled news footage to spread false information about the conflict is a growing trend, making it even more difficult to root out disinformation, according to Dina Sadek, a Middle East research fellow with the Digital Forensic Research Lab.

“We’re laser-focused and dedicated to protecting the conversation on X and enforcing our rules as we continue to assess the situation on the platform,” they said.

The post said X will remove newly created Hamas-affiliated accounts. It also said it is coordinating with industry peers and the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) “to try and prevent terrorist content from being distributed online.”

X said it is “proactively monitoring” for anti-semitic accounts and has “actioned” tens of thousands of posts sharing graphic media and violent and hateful speech.

On Tuesday, European Commissioner Thierry Breton sent a letter to Musk, cautioning that X is spreading “illegal content and disinformation.” EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) mandates that large online platforms such as X remove illegal content and take steps to quickly address how they impact the public.

“Given the urgency, I also expect you to be in contact with the relevant law enforcement authorities and Europol, and ensure that you respond promptly to their requests,” Breton wrote. He advised Musk that he would be following up on matters related to X’s compliance with DSA.

“I urge you to ensure a prompt, accurate, and complete response to this request within the next 24 hours,” Breton said.

The difficulty of rooting out disinformation is made more difficult by the growing trend of using video games and recycled news footage to promote falsehoods about the conflict, said Dina Sadek, a Middle East research fellow with DFR. Telegram has been a major vehicle for disinformation, she added, likely because it doesn’t restrict how often users can post and because the content is sent as a text message.

List of social platforms with at least 100 million active users

https://guides.stlcc.edu/fakenews/spotfakenews

“The second that you think something happened you can give them a boost and give them pictures from the incident,” she told The Record. “There’s just the speed of how things happen when on messaging applications and some of those have large numbers of subscribers.”

Sadek said it is too soon to detect patterns in the disinformation being disseminated — both in terms of the amount and which side’s supporters are most active — but she said she has seen it emanate from all sides of the conflict.

Stanford disinformation scholar Herb Lin told Recorded Future News that he predicts the propaganda war will intensify significantly in the coming weeks, citing Russia’s likely support to Hamas due to its friendly relationship with Iran.

“They have a quick reaction disinformation force,” he said. “They have the ability to react promptly to this sort of stuff and the first people to get on the air tend to dominate the messages for a while.”

Learn more: https://guides.stlcc.edu/fakenews/spotfakenews