Column: On social media, the ‘fog of war’ is a feature, not a bug

The exact size and location of the crater outside the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza was among the factors that internet sleuths seized on to make the case for who was responsible — Israel or Hamas. If you’ve logged on to any given social media platform in the last two weeks, you’ll know what I’m talking about: Ever since Hamas unleashed its horrific attack on Israel, and Israel unleashed its horrific retaliatory bombing campaign on Gaza, there has not only been a deluge of heartbreaking and disturbing stories and images, but of fake videos, out-of-context posts, phony experts, enraged screeds and falsified news — all raining down our feeds in biblical storm-like volumes. As so many of us feel furious and powerless, we might take this occasion to consider the ways that social media delude us into believing we’re interacting with history, rather than yelling at a screen, and how Big Tech bends that impulse to its benefit too, encouraging us to spew out increasingly polemical posts, even before the facts are at all clear, promising to reward the most inflammatory with notoriety, and perhaps even payouts. What we today call misinformation has attended every major crisis or catastrophe since the era of following them online has begun; it’s a symptom of large-scale social media, period. While Gaza officials blamed the Israel Defense Forces for the attack in a statement, the IDF responded with a far slicker social media package to rebut the claims — a graphic-laden series of posts claiming the explosion was the result of a misfiring rocket, complete with what it claimed was intercepted audio of Hamas fighters discussing the accident in peculiar levels of detail.