Family WhatsApps have become a battlefield of guilt, shame, too many baby pictures but more importantly – disinformation. Whether it is from your parents, racist uncle or the husband of your sister everyone hates – people receive a lot of ‘fake news’, problematic memes and Trump tweets to make you wish you could just stay with dad jokes.
The images above might be fake, but the scenario probably did happen. On September 17, Israeli election day, the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted this image warning people about high voting rates of the left parties around 10AM in the morning. The image showed ‘left wing’ cities colored in red, ‘right wing’ cities painted in blue. The problem with this was that the voting rates indicated in the image which ranged between 60-70% were incorrect, because in the morning hours they range between 10-20%. In fact, the overall voting rates in Israel are usually around 70%. Netanyahu had deliberately prepared an image which presents false information to push his supporters to vote.
This was not the only piece of disinformation he spread that day, and as the election day progressed more false information was spread by him and his party members on various social media.
