Israel-Hamas War 2023

[The Minsky Moment]

Really good point sheilbh abovr. "Source X and Y is saying" style journalism doesn't provide much value in a hyperconnected world where everyone and their bots are posting stuff on social media. Where trad journalism can still provide value added is in interpreting and making sense of the cacophony of information and misinformation.

[Jacob]

Two thoughts on the Hospital story:

1) I am glad that the hospital was not blown up. I hope it continues to not be blown up.

2) There seemed to be an concerted (and effective) social media push on the "Israel cruelly and deliberately targeted the hospital and hundreds are dead," with little effort to counter it. It seems to me that Hamas / anti-Israel groups have much better capabilities in the information warfare space than Israel. Were I in charge of Israeli strategic planning, I'd consider investing resources there.

[Sheilbh]

I totally agree, but that trad journalism is very new for newsrooms because some will be the old school reporting of speaking to sources and spokespeople and witnesses, but another strand wll be interpreting and analysing the flood of information.

And I think it requires a different approach to an extent. In the same way as "our man in x" or correspondent reporting is based on the trust and assumption that they're speaking to people, seeing things or, in fact, have sources in the areas they're talking about. I don't think we are sophisticated enough in how we interpret all the information that's available or to take it on trust (and maybe we'll get there) - so it requires interpretation but also explanation. Particularly around the OSINT stuff which I do not understand at all.

The other thing is that I think that lots of media organisations have those teams for big investigations. A long, detailed analysis of what satellite imagery tells us about the camps in Xinjiang or the results of sifting through terabytes of data from a leak. Those are multi-month, big projects - I think big media organisations maybe need almost a standing data and visual analysis team that is called for breaking news too. Just like, in the traditional model, the correspondent in DC or Jerusalem would be feeding in reporting (and, in the modern world, expected to contribute to liveblogs or pieces to cam). I think it's a genuinely new type of journalism and is still perhaps a little siloed.

Edit: Incidentally - seems like an area where AI could be very helpful too. Except for the hallucination risk - so obviously needs a lot of experimentation to work out how to use it safely. But analysing vast amounts of data (whether videos, images, text or whatever) seems like a perfect point where it could help journalism (with human oversight).

[Duque de Bragança]

In related news, but I'm sure one of resident Frenchman will deal with it more extensively in the French politics thread (assuming we have one): apparently Nupes just imploded be melenchon likes Hamas too much

Huh?

Surprise, surprise, Mélenchon's islamo-leftists, most of LFI but for Ruffin, refuse to condemn clearly Hamas, so the communists, socialists and greens are more than tempted to found a new alliance.
Not to mention that Mélenchon has authoritarian tendencies.

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20231018-french-left-wing-alliance-on-brink-of-collapse-over-middle-east-conflict-row

https://languish.org/forums/index.php/topic,16371.510.html

[The Minsky Moment]

It seems to me that Hamas / anti-Israel groups have much better capabilities in the information warfare space than Israel. Were I in charge of Israeli strategic planning, I'd consider investing resources there.

In a propaganda war, the side that has no concern for truth or credibility always has a short-term tactical advantage over the side that cares more about its credibility and reputation for accuracy and will represent only what it thinks it can plausibly verify.

The message OUR EMEMY IS KILLERZ is always going to drown out the message of let's withhold judgment till the facts are known.

[Tamas]

Two thoughts on the Hospital story:

1) I am glad that the hospital was not blown up. I hope it continues to not be blown up.

2) There seemed to be an concerted (and effective) social media push on the "Israel cruelly and deliberately targeted the hospital and hundreds are dead," with little effort to counter it. It seems to me that Hamas / anti-Israel groups have much better capabilities in the information warfare space than Israel. Were I in charge of Israeli strategic planning, I'd consider investing resources there.

Israelis have the significant disadvantage of being Jews.

I mean seriously. Were have been the global Muslim outrage and protests over China's handling of the Uygurs? Or the Left organising protests over the plight of Armenians? Or the whole clusterfuck in Sudan? No, things only seem to go over people's interest treshold when the Jews are involved.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

But I'm not speaking to millions of people like the BBC, NYT, or other media that ran really heavy with the "IDF kills 500+" narrative. In fact even on the forums I post on I was taking the position of "well let's see", which apparently was more reticence than a lot of the Western media had.

Interesting thread from John Burn-Murdoch on part of this issue here:
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1714648538746118265

TLDR many big news organisations don't have OSINT or data teams (though some do) despite the fact that this is a key part of journalism in the modern world. I'd add, crucially, that it's also the information that the public will often find easily accessible online/being shared on social media so the media's role in explaining and interpreting is really key. Even when organisations have those teams they are treated warily as they're often younger and have skills /backgrounds that is very different from more "traditional" journalists so they're not as relied on/used as they could be in an emerging situation. Again I think getting comfortable with explaining uncertainty is really important (and perhaps even more important) when a situation is moving quickly and very unclear.

So when you're in a situation like this which is rapidly developing, fog of war etc - the fall back is correspondents reporting what a "source" or a "spokesman" has said and providing commentary on videos circulating on social media. Most media organisations either don't have the team to really guide them, or don't trust them enough to favour their run (which is also less definitive and likely more slow) over a prominent reporter's sources.

As I say I think this is part of a wider social shift where we are swimming in information and increasingly the old media standbys of "someone told me", vox pops with witnesses etc needs to be supplemented with more prominent analysis of all that information. Especially because the raw information is so often available to us all on social media which causes us to doubt the traditional media's stories.

I'd add that aside from any of this the BBC reporter saying live that it was hard to see what it could be except for an Israeli bomb because of the size etc was just a general editorial clusterfuck. There's places and times when reporters should be invited to speculate. Breaking news, without confirmed facts that's clearly very significant isn't that time.

That said: you don't need osint to know that when Hamas, russia today or radio Tokyo say something it's probably a lie. That should be how-to-deal-with-propaganda-101

[OttoVonBismarck]

I mentioned this guy's BBC appearance earlier, but here is an article covering it:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67140250

My take is this guy should be considered a "Hamas asset", dude was straight lying his ass off:

Zaher Kuhail, a British-Palestinian civil engineering consultant and university professor who was nearby at the time, told the BBC that what he had witnessed was "beyond imagination".

"I [saw] two rockets coming from an F-16 or an F-35 [fighter jet], shelling these people and killing them ruthlessly, without any mercy," he said.

This Hamas plant is in Gaza now, but we can assume he is going back to Britain at some point.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

Two thoughts on the Hospital story:

1) I am glad that the hospital was not blown up. I hope it continues to not be blown up.

2) There seemed to be an concerted (and effective) social media push on the "Israel cruelly and deliberately targeted the hospital and hundreds are dead," with little effort to counter it. It seems to me that Hamas / anti-Israel groups have much better capabilities in the information warfare space than Israel. Were I in charge of Israeli strategic planning, I'd consider investing resources there.

Seemed?  From what I see on Twitter, it's still going on.  I'm still seeing several people retweeting the "Israel destroyed a hospital and killed over 500 people" story as the unvarnished truth.  Traditional media has walked the original headlines back, but the social media campaign has just shifted to calling the revisions lies.

I don't know what effect this is having on those who aren't firmly on one side or the other, but it looks like an uphill battle for Israel to combat this.  It seems like so many people want to believe Israel is evil that they'll overwhelm social media just on sheer volume.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

Edit: Incidentally - seems like an area where AI could be very helpful too. Except for the hallucination risk - so obviously needs a lot of experimentation to work out how to use it safely. But analysing vast amounts of data (whether videos, images, text or whatever) seems like a perfect point where it could help journalism (with human oversight).

I'm biased, due to my current employment, but there are ways to leverage LLMs here that avoid the hallucination problem, and even get sources for the things the model says.  The problem is it requires a lot of data engineering work to ingest the data in a way the model can operate on, build appropriate prompts to guide its research, and potentially build tooling for the model to use in its analysis.  This is something a government or large NGO could do (and I'm sure governments already are), but this is unfortunately way outside the expertise or budget of a news organization (except, perhaps, Bloomberg, but they wouldn't be motivated to tackle the problem outside of the financial world).

[Jacob]

In a propaganda war, the side that has no concern for truth or credibility always has a short-term tactical advantage over the side that cares more about its credibility and reputation for accuracy and will represent only what it thinks it can plausibly verify.

The message OUR EMEMY IS KILLERZ is always going to drown out the message of let's withhold judgment till the facts are known.

Certainly it's a feature of the operational landscape - as is the influence of anti-semitism - that factors into the options available. Perhaps Israel is doing the best possible it can under the circumstances, or maybe there's room for improvement.

[crazy canuck]

I totally agree, but that trad journalism is very new for newsrooms because some will be the old school reporting of speaking to sources and spokespeople and witnesses, but another strand wll be interpreting and analysing the flood of information.

And I think it requires a different approach to an extent. In the same way as "our man in x" or correspondent reporting is based on the trust and assumption that they're speaking to people, seeing things or, in fact, have sources in the areas they're talking about. I don't think we are sophisticated enough in how we interpret all the information that's available or to take it on trust (and maybe we'll get there) - so it requires interpretation but also explanation. Particularly around the OSINT stuff which I do not understand at all.

The other thing is that I think that lots of media organisations have those teams for big investigations. A long, detailed analysis of what satellite imagery tells us about the camps in Xinjiang or the results of sifting through terabytes of data from a leak. Those are multi-month, big projects - I think big media organisations maybe need almost a standing data and visual analysis team that is called for breaking news too. Just like, in the traditional model, the correspondent in DC or Jerusalem would be feeding in reporting (and, in the modern world, expected to contribute to liveblogs or pieces to cam). I think it's a genuinely new type of journalism and is still perhaps a little siloed.

Edit: Incidentally - seems like an area where AI could be very helpful too. Except for the hallucination risk - so obviously needs a lot of experimentation to work out how to use it safely. But analysing vast amounts of data (whether videos, images, text or whatever) seems like a perfect point where it could help journalism (with human oversight).

That is a very good point.  As I pointed out earlier, the CBC reported the claim that Israel had shelled people travelling South on a protected route.  It became obvious that the CBC reporter "on the ground" had simply been repeating a report without first determining its validity.  The CBC withdrew the report.  But did not take any steps to make it clear that their earlier report was withdrawn because it could not be confirmed.

I disagree with your point about AI - that is exactly where things could go badly awry - we have bad enough decisions to publish quickly based on flawed assumptions.  We don't need to pile on to the errors with further flawed assumptions built into the programming of the AI.  Can AI be used to detect fabrications - certainly.  But I doubt its use would end there, and particularly in what appears to be a rush to publish before verification.

[crazy canuck]

Two thoughts on the Hospital story:

1) I am glad that the hospital was not blown up. I hope it continues to not be blown up.

2) There seemed to be an concerted (and effective) social media push on the "Israel cruelly and deliberately targeted the hospital and hundreds are dead," with little effort to counter it. It seems to me that Hamas / anti-Israel groups have much better capabilities in the information warfare space than Israel. Were I in charge of Israeli strategic planning, I'd consider investing resources there.

Seemed?  From what I see on Twitter, it's still going on.  I'm still seeing several people retweeting the "Israel destroyed a hospital and killed over 500 people" story as the unvarnished truth.  Traditional media has walked the original headlines back, but the social media campaign has just shifted to calling the revisions lies.

I don't know what effect this is having on those who aren't firmly on one side or the other, but it looks like an uphill battle for Israel to combat this.  It seems like so many people want to believe Israel is evil that they'll overwhelm social media just on sheer volume.

Not just on Twitter, the Globe and Mail still has that story on its "front page" of its website.

I don't think there are many not directly affected who are on one side or the other.  But I do think there are a lot of people concerned about the welfare of Palestinian civilians and who fully denounce HAMAS who will be swayed by this type of reporting.

[crazy canuck]

Two thoughts on the Hospital story:

1) I am glad that the hospital was not blown up. I hope it continues to not be blown up.

2) There seemed to be an concerted (and effective) social media push on the "Israel cruelly and deliberately targeted the hospital and hundreds are dead," with little effort to counter it. It seems to me that Hamas / anti-Israel groups have much better capabilities in the information warfare space than Israel. Were I in charge of Israeli strategic planning, I'd consider investing resources there.

Israelis have the significant disadvantage of being Jews.

I mean seriously. Were have been the global Muslim outrage and protests over China's handling of the Uygurs? Or the Left organising protests over the plight of Armenians? Or the whole clusterfuck in Sudan? No, things only seem to go over people's interest treshold when the Jews are involved.

It also just might have something to do with the fact that the neighboring Muslim nations have fought a few wars with Israel over this very issue.

[Josquius]

Two thoughts on the Hospital story:

1) I am glad that the hospital was not blown up. I hope it continues to not be blown up.

2) There seemed to be an concerted (and effective) social media push on the "Israel cruelly and deliberately targeted the hospital and hundreds are dead," with little effort to counter it. It seems to me that Hamas / anti-Israel groups have much better capabilities in the information warfare space than Israel. Were I in charge of Israeli strategic planning, I'd consider investing resources there.

Israelis have the significant disadvantage of being Jews.

I mean seriously. Were have been the global Muslim outrage and protests over China's handling of the Uygurs? Or the Left organising protests over the plight of Armenians? Or the whole clusterfuck in Sudan? No, things only seem to go over people's interest treshold when the Jews are involved.

Don't be daft.
Rather than being Jewish it's rather more being nearby and being democratic which is Israels problem.
The uighurs are far away and reporting ruthlessly suppressed. Azerbaijan too has been very strict on letting cameras in to see it's ethnic cleansing.
Plus the Palestinian issue has history. There's an ongoing investment there, support has been built over decades.
Events in Israel have had a huge impact on politics in the west - the oil crisis of the 70s and the subsequent take over of neo liberalism for instance.

Also an issue far more than anything Jewish related is the American link. This draws a lot of attention.

Anti semitism with Israel grows out of the shit israel pulls in the area. It's not the reason people criticise Israel for it.