Social media has become a strange alternate universe filled with garbage, propaganda and lies. There was a time when you could actually get breaking news on social media. In some cases you can, but fake news proliferates to such an extent that it’s gotten to be worse than the regular media. It was bad before, but AI has made it around a thousand times worse by letting everyone create their own reality using AI images and even videos, like the fake video that showed Netanyahu being killed, and of course AI answers that people quote as if they were actually authoritative.
That mass of AI social media slop hit home when reading this account by an American professor working in Israel.
I moved my husband and four kids to Israel in late January for a Fulbright Fellowship, arriving weeks before the war began. Since then, I have become a most accidental correspondent: the person everyone back home texts when they cannot tell the difference between what is on their feed and reality on the ground.
We are living through the first alt-war: a conflict in which the war fought online and the war fought in reality have diverged so completely that they might as well be happening on different planets. It’s not that people lack information, it’s more that they are constructing an entirely different alternate reality — one that confirms what they already believe.
Most mornings, my phone is full of panicked messages. A friend in Pittsburgh. A colleague in Central Asia. A relative in New York. They have all seen the videos of intense missile barrages ravaging Tel Aviv. One video sent to me featured what were ostensibly Israelis marching in droves, on foot across what appeared to be the Judaean mountains escaping the country as it collapsed behind them.
The videos I’ve been sent are all fake. They are either generated by artificial intelligence or simply old footage from somewhere else. I know, because I am here.
Why do people choose to believe lies? The lies are more interesting and exciting. Some have political agendas.
I asked Golan Shahar, a prominent clinical psychologist at Ben-Gurion University and self-described liberal turned centrist, to help me understand. Why do otherwise intelligent people send me AI-generated videos and refuse to believe my firsthand account?
“They don’t want this to work,” he said. “They want it to fail.” Analysts in the U.S., he explained, “cannot have it that Trump and Bibi are the ones defending the West.” People send me these videos because they need me to confirm what they need to be true.
So the media lies. And people who are invested in those lies for political reasons double down. And social media fills with slop, a lot of it coming from the Muslim world and the third world, that is then picked up and passed around.
The people doing this want America to fail. They don’t like the fact that, whatever you think about the war, all the doomsday predictions didn’t pan out, Iran proved to be militarily inept and the U.S. military under President Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth is performing really well. It’s not supposed to work that way. We’re supposed to fail.
And those who want us to fail will keep on believing the lie that we are failing.
