"If nothing can be known, then stupidity is holy."
A rant about how we are completely around the bend on information credibility.
This week’s soundtrack: boygenius - “Satanist”
The last nine days have been awful for my own mental health. The massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7 has been the primary news story in the mainstream news and the primary topic for social media engagement. Even with my curated feeds on social media, I’m bombarded with people screaming about standing with Israelis mourning the massacre or people standing with the civilians being bombarded in Gaza. The word genocide is being used, as are invocations to Jewish historical trauma (rightfully, I’d say, in both cases).
It’s a lot.
(Here’s a link to the Friday night transcript from the rabbi at the community of which I am a part. I was a few feet from Aaron when he gave this sermon/dvar/etc. While I don’t agree with everyone he said, I think he did a terrific job in laying out his own feelings and the import of community holding lots of heavy feelings all at once).
As I wrote about last week, I’m mostly satisfied by the mainstream coverage in legacy print publications via their online presences (I’m staying away from cable news, of course) and I find myself getting my news from the New York Times and Haaretz, both of which are reporting the full circle of the conflict while also challenging some of the narratives that have been brewing. In Haaretz’ case, the on-the-ground reporting has been second-to-none.
(There is a fair criticism, I think, to be levied that the idea that I’m reading the Times and, especially, Haaretz, because they center Israel more than the Gazans. I won’t argue against that criticism. My own perspective is via a Jewish American lens, so these perspectives are more understandable to me and these perspectives cover more than the other U.S.-centric sources. They treat this war as either a righteous fight against Hamas and its heathen followers or, to paraphrase Amos Oz, as a basketball game where the body count is the score. I’ve got no time for either.)
Like I said up top, the massacre and the subsequent conversation really takes an emotional toll. Most of it is the simple empathy for the dying, the hostages, the dead and the bombarded, but the mental anguish around the broader conversation is also a factor. I’ve also had a lot of conversations with a lot of people that have involved me saying things like “Christ, read a fucking book” about history. I’ve been involved in vigils or gatherings in which the phrase “Israel has the right to defend itself” has been invoked; it’s a phrase that has tinges of “All lives matter” or the words “liberty” or “patriot” in this country. Yes, it is correct on its face (that’s the world system and that’s war), but the people saying it are thinking of very different things than the surface-level words.
Where this has been the worst, of course, is on social media. The lack of moderation and the fact that people use social media as a news source are a major problem that are not getting better anytime soon. Everyone is seeing their own views being reinforced, often via bad sourcing.
Charlie Warzel has an excellent analysis over at The Atlantic:
During the first days of the Israel-Hamas war, X owner Elon Musk himself has interacted with doctored videos published to his platform. He has also explicitly endorsed accounts that are known to share false information and express vile anti-Semitism. In an interview with The New York Times, a Hamas official said that the organization has been using the lack of moderation on X to post violent, graphic videos on the platform to terrorize Israeli citizens. Meanwhile, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram and the unofficial lead on the company’s Twitter clone, Threads, has received requests from journalists, academics, and news junkies to make his product more useful for following the war. He has responded by saying that his team won’t “amplify” news media on the platform: “To do so would be too risky given the maturity of the platform, the downsides of over-promising, and the stakes,” he wrote.
…
One-stop information destinations such as Facebook or Twitter are a thing of the past. The global town square—once the aspirational destination that social-media platforms would offer to all of us—lies in ruins, its architecture choked by the vines and tangled vegetation of a wild informational jungle. This may be for the best in the long run, although the immediate effect for those of us still glued to these ailing platforms is one of complete chaos.
…Social media is not just a vector for information. Or misinformation. It’s a place to bear witness, to express solidarity, and to fight for change. All of that is harder now than it was just a year ago. What comes next is impossible to anticipate, but it’s worth considering the possibility that the centrality of social media as we’ve known it for the past 15 years has come to an end—that this particular window to the world is being slammed shut.
I’ll expand on this later, but the large scale effects of this disinformation is hard to determine, but it sucks nonetheless. It often feels like this is all just screaming into the void or preaching to the converted. I don’t know that any of this social media movement – disinformation, opinion, “I Stand with Israel,” Gaza genocide, etc. – is being converted into action, other than to say that the U.S. – and “western” – feeling toward Israel is likely not changing because of a series of leftists on Instagram (I don’t think that’s good, but nonetheless, here we are) nor is Hamas going to suddenly change its approach because some American kid who went on Birthright six years ago stands with Israel.
Which brings me back to social media, as a whole. The amount of resharing – particularly on Instagram – has become a scourge. Like Warzel outlines, the huge amount of bad information being shared is driving people into their own opinions over and over. BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh has been running down these posts on Twitter and it’s worth checking out his feed.
Justin Bieber shared a photo of Gaza as though it is Israel, only to delete it soon thereafter, which ultimately speaks to a very important problem with social media’s power: People care about what Justin Bieber, a singer, thinks about this war. He’s not the only one.
Amy Schumer’s place in the public sphere recently has been one of an activist for American left/center-left causes and she’s has posted a lot of pro-Israel stuff on social media over the last ten days. She’s an American Jewish person like me. Presumably, like me, she has people she cares about over there. However, unlike me, she has posted a series of things on IG invoking Jewish historical trauma and reshares of nationalist extremist Israeli maniacs and, sadly, the oft-cited baby decapitation rumor that has not been verified (though it was reiterated by President Joe Biden, who had to walk it back because it is unverified).
(I don’t doubt that Hamas is an organization capable or likely to decapitate an infant, but the disseminating of those rumors, to a point, downplays the actual suffering of those who were slaughtered. Shot point-blank, hostages being taken and threatened, old people and toddlers killed, dozens slaughtered at a kibbutz, etc.…That should be enough for people to invoke Hamas’ brutality. No one really has to make up the baby being decapitated to prove that Hamas is a brutal, murderous organization.)
I don’t doubt that Schumer is in a raw emotional place that includes fear and an invoking of generational trauma. I am, too (the similarly oft-cited statistics of the most Jews killed in one day since the Shoah is a chilling one. It is not lost on me nor anyone else in our community). And I don’t even blame her so much as I blame anyone who is taking their news (and reposting said news) from her; she’s very funny, but she’s not someone that should be listened to on the topic of war in Israel and Gaza.
Therein lies part of the problem with social media: The “social” aspect of it creates these elevations of voice to people with little or no expertise in the things about which they’re speaking. This is just as true for anti-vaccine idiots as it is for someone spreading rumors about Israeli babies getting their heads cut off. And it’s one thing if it’s one friend talking to another or one account with 2,000 followers talking to said followers. Schumer has 13 million followers on Instagram.
I’m becoming more of an elitist with each day that social media gains prominence in our culture. The democratization of media via these networks has made it so that fame (or money) gives people authority on seemingly everything; why does anyone give a fuck what Alyssa Milano has to say about democracy or politics? Why does anyone listen to Elon Musk about anything other than exploding cars and how to dabble in white nationalism?
I don’t blame those people for popping off. At its core, social media should be a digital version of the conversations anyone overhears on the bus or at a park or wherever. In a better world, Schumer would be telling her close friends that she saw Mrs. Krabappel and Principal Skinner in the closet making babies and she saw one of the babies and the baby looked at her; she would’ve said it on the phone or in-person instead of broadcasting it to millions of people on IG (maybe she says it on a talk show). We don’t live in that better world and it’s quite frustrating that people are taking her word the same as the word of the Israeli government (which itself has plenty of credibility problems), Hamas spokespeople (who are not credible, but at least are directly involved) or third party organizations on the ground like the Red Cross or the United Nations. If anyone finds those lacking, people should seek out Palestinian nonprofits in Gaza or others worldwide like HIAS to learn about the civilian devastation. Don’t just rely on on social media. To paraphrase myself, read a fucking newspaper. Christ.
If I have any advice to people who are reading about the war now, I’d suggest you stay with credible sources and not actors, athletes, celebrities and musicians. Major media organizations on the ground are not flawless, by any stretch, but they have mechanisms in place to give you the best possible information that is vetted.
When I see and absorb all this social media screaming… that is where my nihilism creeps in. My feelings are immaterial on this war (and the occupation and Zionism and so on) because the stone cold facts remain the same regarding the worldwide support – “carte blanche” is the phrase that comes to mind – Israel has. There is a lot of complaining about the double standards that the U.S. government has shown regarding Gazan civilian death against Israeli civilian death, the treatment of Gaza and the historicity of a lot of the things being said from officials; I don’t disagree with those assessments, but screaming about it online is as useful, to quote Ronnie James Dio, as a rainbow in the dark.
I’ve seen invocations from people about the immediate post-9/11 sentiment in the United States being a mirror to today (to say that last week was Israel’s 9/11 is an understatement, in many ways) and warning against the Islamophobic violence and sentiment therein. While this is not an outsized notion, the world is very different now than it was 22 years ago, most notably in that the dissenting voices are more numerous and louder.
But, in the ways that this time is similar, I’ll bring up the futility of these protest movements then and since then. For one, the size of the protest movement is not as big as those in it believe it to be, whatever the morality may be. I lived through and reported on the Iraq War protests and, in the non-war vein, the protests of the Trump years and the Occupy Movement. These protests were ineffective in bringing forward action at the highest levels of government; income inequality is a high as ever, the Iraq War went on for years and Trump’s policies at the southern border remain, even after a change of administration.
But, at least in-person protests (like the Jewish groups that protested at the White House on Monday) are not ephemeral. I feel like the oldest man in the world to say that protests in the streets get more attention than the siloed social media detritus that only drives engagement for the people who own the social media companies.
In the long term, it’s possible that a larger shift on the U.S. approach to Israeli military aid will come. In my lifetime, things have shifted some in public opinion, but the policies have remained the same and the conflict has not cooled (certainly not since Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination).
It all feels futile, probably because it is.
Lulu Update
On that uplifting note, here’s my dog!
A Recommendation: NWSL Matches
As you can see above by the giveaway hat I got (and Lulu modeled), I went to the Washington Spirit’s final home match of the season. The team lost – a questionable red card to the team’s best player meant the Spirit was playing a player down for most of the match – and thus, lost out on the playoffs.
It was still lots of fun. The stadium is the most-inclusive sports environment I’ve ever been in, from the LGBTQIA+ fan groups to the representation throughout the stadium. Two marching bands (one from University of Maryland and one from Morgan State University) played during halftime. There were $2 beers. It was awesome.
Always glad to see Lulu.
I've seen the "most jews killed since the holocaust sound bite and I have real questions about it. First, is it true, how was that measured and what are we counting. Second-- while I don't want to minimize the slaughter in Israel, the invocation of the holocaust suggests a scaled exceeding the low four figures and hints toward 6 million. It's the kind of "statistic" that is more obfuscation than illumination. Is anyone comparing the numbers of Gazan dead (twice the number of jews so far?) to holocaust numbers?