A Failure to Communicate
It's time to kick X, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media to the curb
Israeli occupation of Gaza is a “big mistake” President Biden told Scott Pelley on CBS’ 60 Minutes Sunday, at the end of a long weekend during which the country cut off food, fuel, electricity and most its water after Hamas committed the fiercest atrocities on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Hamas does not represent the majority of Palestinians in Gaza, Biden told Pelley. Similarly, many Israeli’s do not support Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s hard-line stance preventing any notion of the much-discussed, never-implemented two-state solution.
Meanwhile, Donald J. Trump gave his rivals an opening for easy attack when last week he called Iran-backed Hamas “very smart” and criticized erstwhile political ally Netanyahu for being “not prepared” for the attack.
On this last point, Trump is actually on the same page as mainstream critics in both Israel and in the West in wondering how super-hawk Netanyahu could let this attack happen. While Netanyahu may not survive this crisis of confidence in his leadership, Trump probably will get away with his praise for Hamas (see his fawning admiration for Vladimir Putin), according to The Washington Post. Once again, the MAGA-core will let Trump off.
No doubt there are myriad social media posts out there making excuses for Trump’s own social media posts, propping him up as frontrunner for the GOP’s presidential nomination. The usual outlets, from Trump’s own “Truth” Social to X-Twitter to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube et. al. are proving their use in spreading conspiracy theories, misinformation and outright propaganda.
Even the White House has had to walk back, a bit, a “viral” report of Jewish babies beheaded by the terrorist-warriors. This walk-back happened about the same time the European Union announced an investigation of the socmed outlet previously known as Twitter.
“The war between Israel and Hamas has spawned so much false or misleading information online — much of it intentional, though not all — that it has obscured what is actually happening on the ground,” Steven Lee Myers wrote in a news analysis piece for The New York Times.
“Most of it intentional, though not all,” applies to X, whose owner Elon Musk has been blamed for sacking most of the platform’s gatekeepers even as he uses the platform to spread his own misinformation, intentional or not.
The Hustings believes it’s time to kick social media to the curb. We have struggled for three years to gain readership, and yet we get more readers on our own Facebook and LinkedIn pages, which keep those readers on their platform rather than helping direct the readers to https://thehustings.news.
Send your comments on the Israeli-Hamas war, the war in Ukraine, the chaos over choosing a new Speaker of the House, or any other legitimate political news for the right or left column, or your analysis or perspective in the middle column. The email address is editors@thehustings.news. We’ll employ humans to read each comment or analysis for veracity and civility before we post it. (Yes, for now, I’m the only human reading them — help us expand readership and we’ll expand our staff.)
Just like a good, old-fashioned newspaper.
-30-