A macabre video that spread across social media platforms last week showed a young girl being set on fire by a mob, which sharers claimed was the doing of Hamas. But the footage was, in fact, from 2015 in Guatemala, long before the Palestinian group’s attack on Israel.

It was just one falsehood during a week in which often violent misinformation flooded social apps, causing confusion and stoking outrage as the conflict unfolded. Platforms such as Elon Musk’s X, Telegram and TikTok drew the ire of regulators for failing to stop the deluge of misleading information, which quickly spilled into mainstream media and real world politics. 

Many widely-shared posts in this new information battleground, including viral claims that Qatar threatened to cut off gas exports, are provably false. But others inhabit a grey area alongside evidence of proven atrocities.