The war in Gaza is also a war of images – both real and false. Achiya Schatz and his colleagues are working with their NGO Fake Reporter to filter fake news from the internet. From both sides.
A neighborhood in the shadow of inconspicuous concrete buildings in the south of Tel Aviv. In the WeWork glass building on Schocken Street, right next to the editorial office of “Haaretz,” Achiya Schatz and his colleagues sit at a long, bright table. There are stickers on their computers that say “Make Internet Great Again” – that’s exactly what they’re all about. And about the truth.
In 2020, in his mid-30s, Schatz founded the organization Fake Reporter to track down fake news and disinformation on social media and ensure that they are then removed from the major platforms. Or they approach the authorities about it. They are the first organization of their kind in Israel.
Achiya Schatz founded the NGO Fake Reporter three years ago
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For their fact check, with which they refute virtual lies, the fake reporters use open source intelligence, i.e. information from freely available sources on the Internet.
So they follow up on false reports that they receive from all over the world, especially now: Since the Hamas attack on October 7th and Israel’s invasion of Gaza, a rain of hate speech, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism has been raining down on the Internet.