The Biggest Source of Disinformation On The Gaza Conflict Is Ourselves

New data visualizations give a startling picture of online activity during the latest conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. And they reveal just how much online media and social networks help us to create our own information bubbles, customized to reinforce our political beliefs.

[Image Source: U.S. State Department]

Gilad Lotan is the chief data scientist at betaworks, which has launched high-profile companies that include SocialFlow and bitly. Looking at Lotan's network graph of Twitter traffic from his blog i love data, I can't help but feel that we really are living in a version of The Matrix. The media constructs our reality and we're plugged into it 24/7. Except here, in theory, we have the freedom to make our own decisions.

The Biggest Source of Disinformation On The Gaza Conflict Is Ourselves

In Lotan's view, however, that's a big part of the problem:

Not only is there much more media produced, but it is coming at us at a faster pace, from many more sources. … the landscape is much more nuanced, and highly personalized. We construct a representation of our interest by choosing to follow or like specific pages. The more we engage with certain type of content, the more similar content is made visible in our feeds.



A Spectrum Of Views

Lotan has created a network graph representing how Twitter accounts responded to the bombing of a UN school in Beit Hanoun last week. The larger a node, the higher its number of followers. The closer together two nodes, the more connections they share. Different colors represent ideological communities; nodes of the same color are much more inter-connected compared to the rest of the graph.

The Biggest Source of Disinformation On The Gaza Conflict Is Ourselves

As the graph reveals, there's quite a gap between the two sides. On the right, there are "pro-Palestinian" groups of activists (in green) as well as a variety of media outlets and journalists (in gray). "The gray cluster of bloggers, journalists and international media entities is closely connected with the group of pro-Palestinian activists, which means that information is much more likely to spread amongst the two," says Lotan, adding that "this structural characteristic of the graph reinforces general Israeli sentiment regarding international media bias."

The Biggest Source of Disinformation On The Gaza Conflict Is Ourselves

On the left side, there are "pro-Israeli" groups, media outlets and Israeli public personas, (light blue), as well as American conservative groups, including the Tea Party (dark blue).

As Lotan notes:


A Middle Ground?

The one notable exception in Lotan's graph, serving as a bridge between the two sides, right smack in the middle, is the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Why Haaretz? It's been described as a more left-wing version of the New York Times that exists in a twilight zone where it's deemed iconoclastic enough to satisfy Israel's critics yet authoritative enough to appeal to Israel's center-left supporters.

The Biggest Source of Disinformation On The Gaza Conflict Is Ourselves

A Provocative Question

Lotan also expresses concern over the dilemma that the more we engage online media, the more it personalizes itself to fit our political outlooks. He suggests an experiment: Facebook's trending pages aggregate content that are heavily shared across the platform. If you're already logged into Facebook, you'll see a personalized view of the trend, highlighting your friends and their views on the trend. Next, open a separate browser window in "incognito mode" and navigate to the same page. Since the browser has no idea who you are on Facebook, you'll get the raw, unpersonalized feed. See how many differences you notice.

"A healthy democracy is contingent on having a healthy media ecosystem," Lotan observes. "As builders of these online networked spaces, how do we make sure we optimizing not only for traffic and engagement, but also an informed public?"

[Graph images: i love data]