By Michael Grass
University of Washington
Center for an Informed Public
Crisis events like the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza not only lead to the creation of a lot of information but also generate major demand for information amid great uncertainty around rapidly developing news events.
That means that news environments can be fragile and volatile, according to University of Washington Center for an Informed Public postdoctoral scholar Mert Can Bayar, who spoke during a Feb. 6 event hosted by the Henry M. Jackson School for International Studies. “It is very challenging to figure out what and who to trust in that kind of news environment where you need a lot of information in two hours or one hour.”
Bayar, with CIP colleagues Mike Caulfield and Ashlyn B. Aske, co-authored “‘New elites’ of X: Identifying the most influential accounts engaged in Hamas/Israel discourse,” an Oct. 20, 2023, CIP rapid research report that identified the most influential accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter, that were involved in online discourse during the first three days of the armed conflict between Hamas and Israel. The CIP’s findings were subsequently cited by news organizations like NBC News, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Atlantic.
The Feb. 6 event at the Husky Union Building was organized as part of the Jackson School’s War in the Middle East Lecture Series on the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, the war in Gaza and responses worldwide, and was moderated by Reşat Kasaba, a Jackson School professor of international studies and Middle East expert.
Bayar, a political scientist who works on the CIP’s rapid research team, presented key findings from the report, which identified seven accounts on X that, during the first three days of the conflict, shared tweets that were seen more than 1.6 billion times. Those seven accounts, which the CIP team has described as “the new elites” of the platform, greatly outperformed traditional news accounts, which only saw 112 million views.
Bayar shared a few observations about why these “new elite” accounts dominated the news environment on the platform during the first three days of the conflict.
“The first reason is that they had been endorsed by Elon Musk in one way or another,” Bayar said, pointing out that the platform’s new owner had previously engaged with or promoted the accounts in some way. The second reason, Bayar said, was that they frequently published and posted things in the framing of “breaking news” and used numerous images and videos, often involving graphic imagery, Bayar said.
“These accounts are interesting not just because they dominated the news environment but because they don’t have a common agenda or don’t have an overarching ideology,” he said, observing how “some of these accounts are pro-Palestinian, some of them are pro-Israeli and some of them were quite neutral in how they covered the conflict.”
But these accounts shared important similarities, Bayar said, including similar approaches to posting style. “The way they frame their tweets as ‘breaking news’ is very similar. The way they use emotionally loaded language, content and videos is very similar.”
Another common trait: “They have very minimal references to sources of information,” Bayar observed, which can lead to consuming tweets without context.
Bayar cautioned that these seven accounts, one of which The Washington Post later revealed was a teenager from London, are not citizen journalists. “We call them ‘news brokers.’ They are not people posting on the ground, they’re just brokers of that information, posting from somewhere else, but not Gaza.”
Bayar cautioned that crisis events, especially one like the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, can be overwhelming for people trying to make sense of the information they encounter online. “The dosage of information consumption matters. If you consume a lot of problematic information at some point it becomes more poisonous to you than more helpful to you.”
During a Q&A session with the audience following Bayar’s presentation, CIP director and co-founder Kate Starbird, an associate professor in the UW Department of Human-Centered Design & Engineering, explained why X, despite all its changes under Musk’s leadership, is still important for researchers to study. As Twitter changed to X, once familiar online spaces changed, “the rules of engagement changed, and our access as researchers all the sudden became greatly diminished,” Starbird said.
In February 2023, a few months after Musk officially took over as Twitter’s owner, the platform announced changes to accessing Twitter’s application programming interface, or API, that effectively priced out most academic researchers from the data they need to study the platform. At the time, Starbird described the move as an “end of an era for platform transparency and social media research,” something that has required academic researchers, including those at the CIP, to rethink the ways they study the platform.
“The fact that we have this data is a testament to Mike, Mert and Ashlyn doing an amazing job in how to get signal out of, all the sudden, a very not-transparent information space. Historically, we had great access, but now we don’t.” And as a result, she said, researchers don’t know exactly how the platform once known as Twitter has been changing.
Starbird noted that while crisis events have always brought about “new elites” into online discourse, “something has become even stranger in this new era. Moderation has changed. It’s harder to see what’s going on there,” Starbird said. “We still think it’s an important place, but it’s absolutely not what it used to be, which was a thumb on the pulse of the internet all the time. It’s not that anymore and yet it’s still influential in a lot of people’s lives who get their information there.”
During the Q&A, Caulfield, a CIP research scientist and co-author of “Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online” (2023, University of Chicago Press), expanded upon the idea of the seven “new elite” accounts not being traditional citizen journalists. “If you look and think about the idea of citizen journalism, the idea is that someone may be in a position to know because they’re on the ground or because they’ve been following this topic for a long time or because they have a very niche expertise that is incredibly useful at this moment in history,” Caulfield said. “But that’s not what we’re seeing here. None of these people, as far as I can tell … aren’t in any sort of position to know. To use our term, they are more ‘brokers’ of news than citizen journalists.”
The event was also co-sponsored by the Division of Social Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, in partnership with the Henry M. Jackson Foundation.
- Read the CIP’s Oct. 20, 2023, rapid research report, “‘New elites’ of X: Identifying the most influential accounts engaged in Hamas/Israel discourse.”
- Watch a video recording of Mert Can Bayar’s Feb. 6 Jackson School presentation and the Q&A with Bayar, CIP director and co-founder Kate Starbird and CIP research scientist Mike Caulfield.
Michael Grass is the CIP’s assistant director for communication.
Photo at top: During a Feb. 6 presentation in the Husky Union Building, CIP postdoctoral scholar Mert Can Bayar shares key findings from an Oct. 20 rapid research report examining the most influential accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter, engaged in crisis dialogue during the first three days of the Hamas-Israel conflict. (Photo by Michael Grass / Center for an Informed Public)
