Verified Accounts on X Spread 74% of Wartime Misinformation

As the latest Israel and Hamas war reaches its two-week mark, an overwhelming surge of videos and photos claiming to portray the ongoing turmoil has inundated social media platforms.

So far, Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) is struggling to combat wartime misinformation, making advertisers even more cautious about returning to the beleaguered platform.

The platform’s “verified” users, who now pay to have a blue check, pushed 74% of X’s most viral false Israel-Hamas war-related claims, according to a NewsGuard analysis shared with Adweek.

“This is another nail in the coffin for X in terms of deteriorating advertisers’ trust,” said Ruben Schreurs, chief strategy officer at independent marketing and media consultancy Ebiquity. “And they’re enforcing their decision not to return to X.”

In its first week of conflict beginning Oct. 7, the news rating company analyzed the top 250 posts containing misinformation that received the most likes, reposts, replies and bookmarks, and found 186 accounts of the 250—74%—were verified by X. NewsGuard identifies misinformation using a combination of humans and artificial intelligence.

The verified accounts promoted 10 false narratives, such as claims that Ukraine sold weapons to Hamas and a video of Israeli senior officials being captured by Hamas.

Collectively, posts promoting false claims garnered 1,349,979 likes, reposts, replies and bookmarks, and were viewed by more than 100 million people globally in a week, per NewsGuard.

Combating wartime misinformation has been X’s biggest content moderation test as advertisers grow increasingly leery about the platform. In March, Musk began un-checking accounts and selling verification (blue check marks), a feature that was once reserved for high-profile users and professional journalists. Since then, Musk has also slashed the number of content and safety policy positions within the company. 

“That decision [to let people pay for verification] turned out to be a boon for bad actors sharing misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war,” according to NewsGuard.

Under Musk’s leadership, advertisers have grown increasingly uneasy, leading to a stop in ad spend. Since the acquisition, the platform’s ad revenue has declined each month, per Reuters. Meanwhile, ad rates have plummeted by more than 75% and X hit a three-year low, with CPMs as low as 61 cents as of August, according to the 2023 State of Social Media CPM report by Gupta Media.

Former NBCUniversal ad chief Linda Yaccarino’s hiring as CEO in June instilled some degree of confidence among advertisers, but the rampant outbreaks of disturbing content on X have further gutted advertisers’ trust, three sources told Adweek. 

Following discussions with senior leadership across its 75 clients, “the absolute overwhelming majority of our brand advertisers are incredibly concerned with the ongoing misinformation,” Schreurs said. Audi and Sony are both Ebiquity clients—the former ceased organic posting on X in November last year, while Sony has continued.

Adweek has contacted X for a response.

EU’s involvement a ‘key driver of concern’

The platform’s struggle to curb rampant misinformation has brand leaders even more cautious to return.

“Most brand partners hoped that Yaccarino would bring some maturity back to the platform,” Christopher Spong, associate director of social media and communications at media agency Collective Measures, told Adweek. “It quickly became clear that Musk was still running the show.”

Meanwhile, European regulators last week made a formal request for information from Musk’s platform concerning its procedures and practices to address hate speech, dissemination of misinformation and the presence of violent terrorist content pertaining to the Israel-Hamas war.

The flagging by the EU was a “key driver of immediate concern” for brand partners at Ebiquity. 

In response, Yaccarino sent a letter to the EU outlining the platform’s efforts to curb war-related disinformation, including “redistributing resources” and “refocusing internal teams.” X has introduced new enhancements to its Community Notes, a crowdsourced fact-checking feature and has taken action to remove hundreds of Hamas-affiliated accounts.

However, per NewsGuard’s analysis, Community Notes failed to successfully debunk misinformation 68% of the time. Only 79 of the 250 posts that perpetuated wartime misinformation were flagged by the platform with Community Notes.