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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> Both wars have spawned a surge in the spread of misinformation across the web, heightening the importance of Google and other sites that users count on to find up-to-date news

That is so hypocritical coming from the news industry that this past week had massive headlines saying Israel bombed a hospital prompting massive riots across the Middle East, when the truth was that an Islamic Jihad missile misfired and blew up in the parking lot of the hospital. The misinformation spread by the news media probably did as much harm as any spread on tech company platforms.

They seem to want censorship for everyone else, while wanting “freedom of the press” for themselves.

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I’ve been reading about the counterclaims about the origin of that missile all week in the news media, along with quotes from experts about the difficulties of investigating in a war zone. The absolute certainty is mostly social media and the highly partisan tabloids.

Same here. Most that I saw said either on the very first story that they were reporting what Gaza officials were claiming or added that in an update a short time later.

That's how breaking news works. First stories report what people on the scene are claiming (Gaza officials in this case), which is often incomplete, and then update as more information comes in.

For people who regularly read a given set of news sites that works well. Pick a few that have different political leanings and read them fairly consistently and you'll get a decent picture of what's going on.

For people who just get their news by whatever tweets (or whatever they are called now on X) they see in the feed (in many cases just going by the content of the tweet itself instead of clicking the link to read the article at the source) it is not going to work so well.

>For people who just get their news by whatever tweets

There's a similar problem with the snippet headlines showing in televised news bottom screen tickers. Those "...as claimed by (the IDF|Gaza Officials)" parts get clipped off.

Compare to Twitter which has reduced the differentiation between a long form article and an unsourced image and you’ll find that Google News is nevertheless much superior to any other way to get information (though twitter was superior last year!)

Source?

This is an article on the Times of Israel on the subject:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-presents-evidence-misfired...

This article exposes a recorded telephone conversation (which could easily be faked) that this was "friendly fire." The lack of a crater at the impact site, and minimal damage to surrounding buildings, rules out the standard ordinance used by the IDF (although something custom could have been used in this case in an elaborate attempt to shift/inflict blame, but unlikely by reason of Occam's Razor).

This article on Al Jazeera reports the assessment of French intelligence that the IDF was not responsible:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/21/french-intel-says-...

The above article casts some doubt on the Israeli assertions (and French assessment) and reports on calls by the U.N. for a full investigation.

The well-known video of the explosion has a high-pitched whine which would not be heard in the standard munitions used by the IDF, which do not have propulsion as I understand.

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/10/18/gaza-h...

This is either an accidental weapons malfunction, or a false-flag attempt, but the later seems unlikely as the Israeli government response seemed somewhat muted if it were planned by them.

"Our weapons are too good to have made it, it was obviously themselves"

I would say that the probability of a false flag is not zero.

The question would be who, how, and why.

I would say the probability of being IDF is 100%. The length people will go to lie and pretend to not is what is up to debate now.

It's still quoted that way by some major news organizations[1], though now the stories have "Gaza Officials Claim..." they didn't earlier. Though they seem to now be trying a new "it's not clear" angle[2]. Note there's also plenty of misinformation on other news items that's in Israel's favor.

Personally, it's hard for me to cast too much judgement on this particular kind of reporting, given there's quite a lot of indiscriminate bombing in densely populated areas. And a huge incentive to use anything you can to help promote a cease fire.

[1] One example: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/10/17/photos-an-israe...

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/20/what-have-open-sou...

Tell me about spreading propaganda while spreading propaganda. You know what is causing the world to riot against Israel? Israel bombing Gaza and human beings (kids among them). The hospital was just one of the targets, by mistake or not.

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