Dancing teens and cat videos? Anyone who only associates platforms like Tiktok with this is wrong. Some gruesome images of war are also shown there. Not all of them are authentic.
The short clips are sometimes about a sauce recipe and sometimes about make-up tips. One click further, a boy is filmed, sobbing and with a pained face, talking about a bomb attack and injured children. Hashtag: #SavePalestinianChildren (Save Palestinian Children).
Then you have to take a deep breath. It is still a comparatively harmless example among the many recordings that are currently circulating on the Tiktok platform and other channels in view of the war in the Middle East. Children and young people can come across something disturbing between casual and light entertainment, which in many cases is not even authentic. There are therefore risks for adults too.
Algorithms reward emotional things
According to experts, the content that is flushed into people’s feeds depends primarily on economic factors: people want to spend as much time as possible on the respective platform. It’s about data and advertising. Particularly sensational, particularly polarizing and particularly emotional content is shown to users more often, says communications scientist Edda Humprecht. She researches disinformation at the University of Jena, among other things.
Such content usually provoked a particularly large number of reactions in the comment columns: very strong opinions and opposing positions, including hate comments. Humprecht sees the fact that such content is particularly pushed by the platforms as harmful to democracy. Anyone who just reads the comments without involvement might get the impression that there are only two extreme positions in the debate.
Conflicts and wars seem to be particularly suitable topics. “War topics are threatening, people are interested in them, sometimes voyeurism may also play a role,” says Martin Emmer, founding director of the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society and head of the media use department at the Free University of Berlin. “This means that spectacular content, including violent content, often exerts a fascination and generates higher demand and interactions.”
Brief information from the bubble
“Social media is one of the biggest challenges in the fight against hatred and radicalization,” says Dervis Hizarci, board member of the Kreuzberg Initiative against Anti-Semitism. This has been active since 2003 and offers, among other things, workshops in schools. Hizarci describes social media as a kind of amplifier for existing social ills.
Media like Tiktok offer a way to pass the time, but users are also increasingly accustomed to consuming short, crisp information that is tailored to their own taste. “You can also notice this in the learning behavior and attention span,” says Hizarci, who used to work as a teacher in Kreuzberg.
The work on changing people’s attitudes and behavior is therefore in danger of becoming more difficult. Because reality is more complex than it appears on social media. Dealing with complex, neutral information takes a lot more time. The development is particularly worrying among children and young people who only use social media, says Hizarci. In a Bitkom survey at the beginning of the year, a good half of people under 30 agreed with the statement that without social networks they would often not know what is happening in the world.
Political expertise is only a secondary criterion
“We all tend to have our worldviews confirmed by content,” says Berlin scientist Emmer. On Tiktok, but also Instagram, you can often find formats in which people hold their faces into the camera and comment on topics such as war.
Hizarci imitates a typical speech: “Hey guys! That’s not possible. Did you notice… I took a closer look at it.” This works through closeness to everyday life and authenticity, says Hizarci. Young people even trusted people who had previously excelled at other topics such as smartphone tips. In addition, in chat groups with friends and acquaintances, people encourage each other and boost each other up when commenting. That is difficult to break. Common enemy images create identity.
“The impact of disinformation is particularly great when opinion leaders in your own community spread positions,” says Humprecht. If a position is repeated frequently, the likelihood that it will be believed increases. In addition, people are less alert in an entertainment environment: disinformation with emotional content can be particularly effective there.
Misinformation circulating
Fact-checking organizations around the world have examined numerous examples of misinformation in the war between Israel and Hamas. One strategy is to present old photo or video material in a different context than current. An example: In a video that fact checkers from the German Press Agency recently checked, a city could be seen at night, bathed in red light, accompanied by banging noises – supposedly recent footage from the Gaza Strip after Israeli attacks. However, the review found that older scenes from Algeria are shown, probably when football fans celebrated with fireworks.
The experts interviewed all assume that disinformation is being used in a concerted manner in the current war. Strongly emotional content would be launched, which users would then spread knowingly or unknowingly, explains Marcus Bösch, who researches, among other things, disinformation campaigns in online media at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. “References to the original author are obscured in order to cut connections.” In their spirit, these campaigns help to heat up the mood. It’s about manipulating opinions and dominating discourse.
Berlin researcher Emmer describes the advantage for the actors as follows: Campaigns could be played out globally. “Senders can stay ahead of national security actors in this way.”
Experts do not see total radicalization
In Berlin, the police were recently apparently surprised by the rapid and massive mobilization for a Palestinian demonstration that was initially not banned. Instead of the 50 registered participants, more than 1,000 came. Police Chief Barbara Slowik later said that this was intensively advertised over the Internet and chat channels at short notice.
Nevertheless: Emmer advocates not overestimating the role of social media. In the current case, he sees “ignored, failed integration debates over decades” as the central problem. The fact that people had apparently cultivated anti-Semitic hatred for a long time was little noticed in everyday life and is now becoming visible through these media. “There is a lack of evidence that social media has completely radicalized people.”
The current pattern of the young Tiktok generation is nothing completely new for him: Even before, there were people who watched entertainment TV all day and then the “Tagessschau” in the evening. Today, this form of non-political media use only comes in a new technical guise.
What to do?
For children and young people, the impressions of war images are much stronger because their brains are still developing, said media psychologist Maren Urner recently on ARD. It is all the more important not to let consumption get out of hand, to become aware of usage patterns and to talk about them. The brain – even in adults – needs times when nothing new comes in in order to process what it has seen.
In an interview with dpa, other researchers advocate strengthening knowledge about, for example, manipulated content, fact checking and the creation of news. They are also in favor of verbal disarmament in public discourse in general because, for example, very pointed, generalizing statements are more likely to promote polarization. Offers for young people should be empathetic and attractive, should be based on their world and, for example, make them change their perspective.
“It shouldn’t get to the point where cynicism spreads and information is viewed as equal regardless of the source,” says Humprecht.