As war ravages between Israel and Hamas, people have understandably taken an interest in the unfolding tragedy, sharing information about it on social media. Palestinian militant group Hamas sent fighters across the border to Israel and fired thousands of rockets in an unprecedented attack on Saturday. At least 900 people have reportedly been killed in Israel and more than 600 have been killed in Gaza, with dozens more taken hostage by Hamas. But not everything shared about this conflict on platforms such as X/Twitter can be characterised as information. Indeed, there has instead been a torrent of misinformation and fake news corrupting the internet, creating false narratives and warping people's minds. For instance, X/Twitter placed a "media manipulation" warning on a tweet by Ofir Gendelman, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that featured a 28-second video claiming to show Hamas firing rockets towards Israel during the latest round of violence - footage he said was evidence of a "war crime". However, it has since emerged that the video in question is at least two years old. The tweet has now been deleted. Meanwhile, the i reports that false reports that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had been taken to hospital circulated on the platform. A fake Jerusalem Post account circulating the reports has now been removed from X. CNN reports another viral video claiming to show Israel generals after being captured by Hamas fighter was viewed more than 1.7 million times by Monday. The video however actually shows the detention of separatists in Azerbaijan. Here are some more fake posts, as debunked by BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh: One in five social media accounts participating in online conversations about the Hamas attacks and their aftermath are fake, according to Cyabra, an Israeli analysis firm. As reported by the Guardian, the company found that approximately 30,000 fake accounts have been spreading pro-Hamas disinformation or gathering sensitive details about their targets. “In times of war, social media becomes a propaganda battlefield; there is always an element of disinformation and exaggeration,” Emerson Brooking, senior resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab told CNN. “Today, X is the main platform where this online battle plays out.” "In crises like terrorist atrocities, wars and natural disasters, people tend to descend on social media platforms for quickly accessible information," Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, told AFP. "(But) the flood of grifters spreading lies and hate to garner engagement and followers, combined with algorithms that promote this extreme and disturbing content, is why social media is in fact such a bad place to access reliable information." Be careful with what you see on social media. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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Regulators in the United States have approved the sale of chicken made from cultivated cells, marking a huge step for the nation’s first “lab-grown” meat. The move comes after Good Meat, a developer of chicken grown from animal cells, announced in March 2023 that it had received a “no-questions” letter from the Food and Drug Administration, which indicated the FDA was satisfied that the product was safe to sell, according to CNN. Upside Foods, another company that makes chicken using cultured cells, received a similar letter from the FDA in November, the outlet reported. At the time, Dr Uma Valeti, the founder and CEO of Upside Foods, called the approval a “watershed moment,” noting it’s “never happened before in the history of humanity”. However, before the lab-grown meat could be made available to US consumers, it required approval from the US Department of Agriculture. With Tuesday’s approval by the Agriculture Department of federal inspections required to sell meat and poultry in the US, the two California companies will be able to make the lab-grown chicken available to restaurants and, later, to supermarkets. The goal of lab-grown meat is both to eliminate harm to animals and to reduce the enivornmental impacts of traditional animal agriculture. “Instead of all of that land and all of that water that’s used to feed all of these animals that are slaughtered, we can do it in a different way,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and chief executive of Eat Just, which operates Good Meat. The cultivated meat is made using cells from a living animal and grown in steel tanks. Upside’s lab-grown meat first comes out in large sheets, before it is then formed into recognisable chicken shapes, while Good Meat turns the chicken cells into cutlets, nuggets, shredded meat and satays. Good Meat’s chicken is already available in Singapore, the first country to allow the sale of lab-grown meat. As for when individuals living in the US can expect to see the meat in grocery stores, it will likely be some time, as the lab-grown chicken is more expensive than traditional meat, and cannot yet be produced on the same scale, according to Ricardo San Martin, director of the Alt:Meat Lab at University of California Berkeley. However, those eager to try the cell-cultivated meat will be able to do so in certain restaurants, with Upside partnering with San Francisco restuarant Bar Crenn to make the meat available to consumers, while dishes made with Good Meat will be served at Chef Jose Andrés’ restaurant in Washington, DC. According to Amy Chen, Upside’s chief operating officer, the most common response the company has gotten from people who have tried the meat is that it “tastes like chicken”. Read More Lab-grown meat is worse than real thing for climate. But will it always remain that way? Company creates mammoth meatballs using DNA from extinct animal Lab-grown meat takes one step closer to hitting supermarket shelves

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