Once my friend was making cottage cheese and I heard this really odd angry noise coming from the corner where the cottage cheese was so went upto my friend like 'umm the cheese is growling' but turns out it was a coffee machine
[ID: Wikipedia-style inset with a photo of two small birds captioned ‘Two great tits, the one on the left is female, the second one is male.’ The figure of the female bird has been pixelated to censor it. /end ID]
I said this during the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine but it seems important to say it again about Israel and Palestine: you should be skeptical of anything you see that’s not confirmed by multiple reliable sources with hard evidence. Everything you see on social media should be treated as suspicious until proven otherwise.
What’s happening now is the fog of war: every side of the conflict has an incentive to lie, journalists are working under dangerous conditions and with limited access, professional disinformation networks are in full swing, and people on social media are spreading falsehoods both on accident and on purpose.
However the facts may shake out with the benefit of retrospect, your default position should be to doubt anything that seems especially sensational and spectacular.
BBC reporter Shayan Sardarizadeh has been doing daily threads to debunk false claims going around Twitter:
