to videos and sensitive information that is not necessarily true. To do?
12:01 AM
This week, President Gustavo Petro broke Colombia’s relations with the state of Israel, saying that he could not tolerate the genocide that has been committed in Gaza since October of last year. The decision was criticized by former presidents, politicians of all stripes and academics, but it was also applauded by local and international leftist sectors, by academics, by activists; In addition, it was a celebration for the thousands of actively political Young people in the country, many of whom participated in the social outbreak of 2019, which was a social media phenomenon.
Now, Petro is accused of crying for only one eye, because while he has made the war in Gaza his international hobbyhorse, he has said nothing about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and it does not even occur to him to break relations with the country that Vladimir Putin governs. Support for Palestine has been a flag of the Latin American left, which is why Cuba and Venezuela broke their relations with Israel many years ago. Petro has joined a fairly clear current which generates support from the bases that already voted for him in 2022.
You may be interested in: War in the Gaza Strip: the unknown details of the “second holocaust”.
A month ago, the UN rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, condemned the destruction of a hospital in Gaza and said: “The world is witnessing the first genocide shown live by the victims themselves.” Social networks have been flooded with videos in which you can see children completely covered by the dust of the rubble, mutilated children, dead children, women crying over the corpses of their relatives, men crying their eyes out. Social networks have been the instrument to show the world what is happening in Gaza, however, the exposure seems more than orchestrated.
Some sources from Israel assure that in many cases, the videos that reach social networks are a montage mounted by a propaganda machine that they call “Paliwood”, a kind of conjunction between the words Palestine and Hollywood, although they assure it without show evidence of the claim; In addition, they also say that Hamas terrorist squads are actually hiding in the hospitals that they have attacked, since Gaza is full of tunnels in which men armed to the teeth hide who go from their bases to places such as health centers and schools, and of which Israeli intelligence has videos that we have been able to see.
Social networks are the triumph of propaganda, and this applies to any political side: in Colombia left or right, Petrista or not, Uribista or not; in the case of Gaza: pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli. There is no place where we see biased information like on social networks: there is no contrast, there is no explanation, there is no context. A video or a photograph alone is not conclusive evidence, much less in these times, times of artificial intelligence. What we see, once so real, may now be a total lie.
A few days ago, the newspaper The Wall Street Journal published an extensive article in which he talked about how the TikTok algorithm recommended minors watch videos about the war in Gaza. The text begins like this: “Imagine that her 13-year-old son logs on to TikTok and, while he watches videos, he stops at images of explosions, rockets and terrified families from the war in Israel and Gaza. His son does not search or follow any account. But simply pausing videos about the conflict causes the app to start offering more war-related content.”
The American newspaper created a handful of accounts with the parameters of a minor — it exactly pretended that he was 13 years old — and studied what happened with the network’s algorithm when browsing the “For You” feed, which would be equivalent on Twitter to the “For you” tab or on Facebook to the so-called Wall.
The text continues: “Within hours of registering, TikTok began serving some accounts with highly polarized content, reflecting often extreme pro-Palestinian or pro-Israel positions on the conflict. Many stoked fear. Dozens of these alarmist or end-of-the-world videos were shown more than 150 times on eight accounts registered by the Journal as 13-year-old users. Some spectators urged preparation for an attack. “If you don’t have a gun, buy one,” warns one. While a considerable number of war-related videos provided to the Journal accounts supported one side or the other in the conflict, a majority supported the Palestinian view.”
TikTok’s dominance as a source of information is superlative. Young people find information on the queen social network, there are thousands of accounts that make complaints or even expose biased information in a fun way. Last year the Reuters Institute provided an analysis of how people have stopped getting information through traditional channels and now prefer social networks, influencers or famous people.
According to the study, which was released a little less than a year ago, in Latin America six out of ten users get information through networks.
“When reviewing behavior by social network, Facebook remains the most popular, a position it has held for more than five years, but its influence on journalism is decreasing since in 2015 45% of people used it to consult news (in a range of one week) to 28% in 2023. YouTube, which has never risen above 25%, has remained stable in the last decade, at levels ranging from 16% in 2014 to 20% by 2023 and WhatsApp passed from 7% to 16%. It is more common, to date, to see newsletters of media through this messaging application. TikTok, for its part, appeared on the media scene in 2020 and thanks to taking advantage of the momentum of the pandemic, in four years it went from 1% to 6% in weekly use. Reuters Institute estimates that it reaches 44% of young people in all content and 20% in the case of news,” the newspaper published. The Republic.
In a scan done by journalist Néstor Espinosa, from EL COLOMBIANO, it was found that, in the last month, 380,700 mentions of the word Israel were made on TikTok, which came from 346,900 authors. Meanwhile, on Facebook, Twitter and Telegram there are 84,274,900 mentions that came from 52,622,600 users, it may be one of the topics that generate the most interest in the world. For some American analysts, this overexposure to videos of the war in Gaza is the reason for the uprisings of protests in the main universities of that country.
And the tracking done with the Youscan tool revealed to us that the word Israel on Tiktok had about 98,000 mentions in the United States alone, followed by Israel with about 32,000 mentions, then they come in order: France, Brazil, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia , Germany, the United Kingdom and Mexico.
Let’s go back to the WSJ investigation, where it is mentioned that most of the accounts they created fell into rabbit holes of war videos, just for having briefly paused in one of these contents. “On one account, the first video related to the conflict appeared as the 58th TikTok video posted. After reading several videos like this, the account was soon inundated with others of protests, children suffering, and descriptions of deaths. TikTok determines what content to serve to users with a sophisticated algorithm based on what its users see, rather than basing it primarily on the accounts users follow or the content they subscribe to, as is the case with other social networks. “This makes it difficult for researchers and parents to understand the experiences young people have on the popular app.”
The company TikTok — which, by the way, has suffered great criticism in the United States, where Congress is studying its ban and mentions an alleged pro-Palestinian inclination — told the newspaper that only between “October 7 and November 30 removed more than 6.9 million videos with shocking and graphic content, 2.4 million that promoted violent and hateful organizations and individuals, 2 million with hate speech, and 131,000 with harmful misinformation.”
TikTok has already been criticized for failing to curb fake posts. Just a few months ago, dozens of videos were released showing Russian troops landing in Gaza in support of the Palestinians. Several users who are dedicated to confirming news pointed out that it was all about a meeting between American and Russian troops in northern Syria, nothing could be further from the reality of Israel and Palestine.
And so information reaches the world, without knowing very well what its origin is. If everything is true. But on the other hand there are the protagonists; last December, the newspapers The country and The New York Times They published how soldiers uploaded their experiences on the battlefield to TikTok, there was laughter, jokes and even songs about the rubble. The reality transmitted on networks these days can not only be deceitful, it also reveals its atrocious nature.
Protests at a US university
At least 14 students from Princeton University, southwest of New York, have begun an indefinite hunger strike in solidarity with the population of the Gaza Strip, the target of an Israeli military offensive. Protesters have been camped on campus for ten days in the Gaza Solidarity Camp.
The hunger strike began this Friday and will continue until their demands are met: meeting with the university management to discuss investments related to Israel and proposals for disinvestment and a cultural and academic boycott of Israel, the protest organization has reported. .
The participants in the hunger strike have expressed their solidarity with the people of Gaza and Palestine “who have been systematically subjected to famine and deprived of food in what is already one of the worst humanitarian disasters in human history.”
They also ask for amnesty for the criminal and disciplinary sanctions imposed on participants in the protest and to reverse the bans on access to the campus and the expulsions of students from the residence halls, according to the North Jersey news portal. A total of 15 protesters were detained on Monday at this university and hundreds were arrested in other pro-Palestinian protests at universities across the United States.
“Millions of Gazans continue to suffer the siege of the State of Israel. Two million inhabitants now face induced famine. United in solidarity with the Palestinian people,” the organizers of Princeton’s Divestment against Apartheid Israel have called.
Elsewhere, Manhattan police cleared an encampment at New York University after dawn, and an official posted a video on social media showing protesters emerging from their tents and dispersing when ordered to do so over a loudspeaker. The scene seemed relatively calm compared to the crackdown at other universities in the country — and some around the world — where protests against Israel’s war in Gaza have multiplied in recent weeks. University authorities, who have tried to balance respecting the right to protest and addressing reports of violence and hate speech, have increasingly called on police to remove protesters before end-of-year exams. and graduation ceremonies.
To read more news about politics, peace, health, justice and current events, visit the Colombia section of EL COLOMBIANO.
