Edited footage of protesters chanting “gas the Jews” at the rally outside the Sydney Opera House in October was shared on social media, but NSW Police said an extensive investigation found no evidence of it happening.
Edited footage of protesters chanting “gas the Jews” at the rally outside the Sydney Opera House in October was shared on social media, but NSW Police said an extensive investigation found no evidence of it happening.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Political propaganda/lies has been a war tactic for as long as wars have existed and pretty much everyone does it.
Our news organisations are failing us by reporting on things that they haven’t been able to verify. I can forgive regular people spreading unreliable info on social media… but journalists should be held to a higher standard than that.
With all the rapidly developing technology for sound and image manipulation, I imagine it would be difficult if not impossible for media to forensically unpick every video. I don’t know what the solution is, and I’m worried it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Inciting social unrest or political support just got a whole lot more sophisticated.
I think the solution is to clarify that the veracity of the claim has not yet been independently verified, as is practice for wartime reporting and coverage of natural disasters.
“ABC News has received the following video allegedly showing the event, but ABC journalists have not been able to receive independent verification of the claim(s) or the accuracy of what is depicted and spoken”.
I’ll admit to, not surprise per se, but certainly a sense of relief. If there were antisemitic chants from a minority of protesters, it wouldn’t at all take away from the importance of the message of the majority. But it would undermine the effort in the eyes of the disinterested public.
There’s no denying that a small minority of actual antisemitic extremists are taking advantage of this moment to harass and target Jewish people, and I also wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that Israel is promoting false flag operations (after all, it’s a known fact that they propped up Hamas in its early days, and this would be so much less extreme than that). Those two factors combine mean I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard the finding went the other way.