Malcolm X’s famous quote is roughly sixty years old, but even he would be astonished by social media’s corrosiveness on political discourse. The nasty, polarised response online to this new round of Israeli-Palestine hostility has clarified that all media platforms are, to varying degrees, used by individuals and governments to spread misinformation.

Now, when I say social media, I’m referring to the artist formerly known as Twitter. Its format of instantaneous feedback has made it the epicentre of news reporting (in-between all the ad trash for Wish-like scam sites). Throw in a huge number of users and scant moderation and this makes it a petri-dish for any version of a story to be crafted and ratified as truth via online populism. Sure, free speech, but here’s the cost of doing business this way – in real-time, facts become indistinguishable from opinion, so both are malleable and “what you believed to be true at the time” becomes absolution to justify holding any position, even if it’s later debunked. Fact checking takes time, and waiting for clarity sidelines you while the conversation is happening. There truly is no truth anymore, it only matters what you can convince people to believe there and then.

Corporate legacy media is certainly not the antidote, with many adopting editorial positions influenced by or to appease lobbying, advertising and private financing. As a consequence; people seek editorialised news which caters to their political outlook, particularly as they believe contentious stories are not reported on with good faith or impartiality. This mistrust of mainstream media and the social media muddle emboldens politicians and governments to think they can get away with gaslighting and using doublespeak even in the face of concrete evidence to the contrary. Take Keir Starmer, he said Israel had the right cut off water and power to Gaza on LBC. A few days later, aware of this stance being a sufficiently unpopular, albeit not technically incorrect, you’ll note, instead of just talking an L and admitting he got it wrong “Sir Keir” tried to weasel his way out of it with a denial.

We expect this kind of duplicity from politicians when seeking election, but the IDF claiming Hamas beheaded forty babies on the seventh of October was a sinister and macabre manipulation of a tragedy. American president Joe Biden mentioned it as if it was fact, but had to offer a retraction. Suitably, worryingly, nobody surrounding the man in charge of a country with the world’s most powerful military thought to check if it was true, or they did and didn’t care.

Christopher Hitchens once stated a claim made without evidence can be dismissed, but on social media lies spread and become imbedded; even weeks later on Twitter those who support Israel’s assault on Gaza are still parroting that these beheadings really happened. We know children and women were killed, usually that’s grotesque enough. But releasing details of excessive cruelty and brutality roused enough support in the right places for Israel’s retribution narrative and military plans to achieve it. Just look at the initial reinforcement from the political classes, “Israel has a right to defend itself”. Defending itself means attempting to displace over a million people and killing nearly (by most estimates) ten-thousand civilians. Tactically this approach can be described as interesting, in reality it looks incompetent militarily, but worst of all it’s opportunistic.

The bombing of the Al-Alhi hospital was another egregious example where mass death became propaganda in lieu of certainty and facts. Credit to Channel 4 for questioning the claims from both sides, including the IDF’s doctored evidence to attempt to absolve themselves, querying the number killed by the rocket attack and challenging Hamas to produce evidence they claimed to have that it was an Israeli missile.

All the squabbling in the media over petty embellishments, linguistics and who’s guilty and who’s to blame, is in of itself another means obfuscating and distracting us from the immediate need for a ceasefire. The objectiveness of calling for one isn’t a sexy hot take, won’t get you attention and it feels futile as it won’t solve the Israel-Palestine debacle, similarly I don’t see one for this morass of cleaving to media misinformation we’ve arrived at, other than to opt out of it. In typical Twitter fashion I offer only my observations, no solutions and act entirely in my own self-interest by choosing to leave it.

My idea to quit Twitter is stolen from Sam Harris. His motivations differed to mine – he explained on one of his podcasts that the platform adversely affected his mental well-being, especially as a public figure who had become habitually wedded to using it for feedback to his content. Now, you could say using Twitter for this is his mistake, but, be honest, tell me you haven’t found yourself wading through Twitter’s moronic litterbin of conspiracy theories, myopic mental gymnastics, whataboutery, abuse, trite three-word tweets such as “Israeli’s are scum” and thought, what’s the point of being part of this? What does it solve?

Perhaps there is validity to the argument that the less you’re exposed to news stories and how people react to them on social media the more objective and measured your response to an event is likely to be. It’s an appealing theory. When considering this and the time I’ll also save just from browsing Twitter, it sounds too good to not give it a try. Goodbye and good luck to the rest of you.