Almost three quarters of the most viral posts on Twitter/X that spread misinformation about the war in Israel They come from verified accounts.

This was stated by an analysis by NewsGuard, which determined that the distributor publications fake news received 1,349,979 interactions and that viewed more than 100 million times all over the world in just one week.

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During the first week of the conflict (October 7 to 14), NewsGuard analyzed the 250 posts with the highest engagement (likes, retweets, replies and favorites) that they promoted the 10 false or unfounded stories most notable war-related events. The results were forceful: 186 of these 250 messages – 74% – were published by accounts verified by Twitter/X.

In March 2023, Elon Musk, owner of X/Twitter revised the platform’s verification system, allowing users to pay a fee of $8 per month to display a blue check mark on their profile and have their tweets/posts prioritized by the algorithm used by X.

This means that the posts appear above, with greater prominence, in user responses and in search results. That decision turned out to be blessing for bad actors who shared disinformation about the war between Israel and Hamas.

For very little money they were able to access the prestigious blue markwhich at some point was a guarantee of credibility, and allowed them to reach a broader audience on the platform.

Read also: After claims about the spread of fake news, X claims that he deleted false news about the conflict in Israel

Although the cybersecurity company also identified false or unsubstantiated war-related narratives spreading widely on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Telegram and other social networks, it decided to focus on X/Twitter because it seems to be the the only platform that has made public the reduction of its moderation efforts.

NewsGuard also found that most false narratives related to the war between Israel and Hamas so far seem to go viral on X before spreading to other platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.

Given these criticisms and complaints, now common, Musk often touts expanding X’s fact-checking feature, called Community Notesa function that allows users themselves to report fake news or clarify confusing facts. However, it was discovered that only 79 of the 250 messages spreading misinformation about the war were flagged by the platform with one of these community notes. This means that clarifications or denials are seen in some of the most prominent and damaging disinformation posts on the platform only 32% of the time.

These are the 10 false or unsubstantiated claims identified by NewsGuard shared by these verified accounts:

• Ukraine sold weapons to Hamas
• Israel has killed 33,000 Palestinian children since 2008
• There are Israeli or Palestinian children in cages
• Videos of senior Israeli officials captured by Hamas
• The Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyry in Gaza was destroyed by an Israeli bombardment
• Hamas fighters celebrating kidnapping of Israeli child
• CNN stages attack on its news team in Israel
• White House memo shows US approved $8 billion in aid to Israel
• Israel stages the death of a child in a Hamas attack
• The Hamas terrorist attack was a “false flag” carried out by Israel or the West