STOP Posting About Israel & Gaza (Until You Do This!)

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I'm gonna let you in on a little secret.

Sometimes I get it wrong.

Hard to believe.

I know, but it's true.

Sometimes my emotions get the best of me and I speak or act or post

something impulsively, which as you might guess doesn't usually work out.

Just ask my wife weekly.

Shout out to Courtney.

But look, we all make mistakes, right?

We all let emotion get in the way of reason.

Sometimes it's part of being human.

What separates people of integrity from people of EG is the assumption

that we will get things wrong.

So we need to be constantly vigilant.

When we do err, we must swiftly and comprehensively work to erase or

correct the mistake and learn from it.

Not exactly the most popular practice these days.

Indeed, I've observed a very common mistake that all of us make with

regularity, yet rarely seek to clear up, and it falls under a number of common

cognitive biases, which if you've been listening to this show long enough,

you know, I find endlessly fascinating.

Take your pick.

Truth, bias, cognitive ease, elusory, truth effect, confirmation bias,

heuristic processing, chat chip, etes got the details, but they're

basically all variations on a theme.

The default behavior whereby we unconsciously accept something we read

or watch or hear as truth without any due diligence, just because it's been

repeated or feels familiar or is less mental work than actual analysis or

confirms a previously held belief, or just because our instinct is to

assume others are telling the truth.

We get snared by these cognitive pitfalls all the time in ways both large and small.

Small example, a store clerk tells you it's gonna rain today.

Then later you tell your friend it's gonna rain today.

You didn't check the weather, you didn't look outside, you didn't even

know this guy, but you believe it's gonna rain as a matter of fact, simply

because someone told you it would.

Bigger example social media.

We'll repost a friend or an expert or even a stranger without

literally any verification or deep knowledge on the subject.

I. We just accept the post as complete and total fact.

Hit a couple buttons and boom, we've joined the conversation.

I fell preyed to this pattern recently when I reposted a news story about

which, frankly, I was not well-informed.

Immediately, some folks DMed me with counterpoints, and I realized my

understanding was so shallow based entirely on other people's voices, new

snippets and Instagram reels that I was not remotely equipped to respond.

So I cleaned up the mistake.

I deleted the post because if I don't know what I'm talking about,

why the hell am I talking about it?

Since that day, I've been using a mantra of sorts, one that I think would

change the world if we all took it up.

Before I post or speak, I ask myself this simple question, how

much do I really know about this?

That's it.

That's the whole thing.

And if the answer is not a lot.

Close the app, close your mouth and open a search bar.

Or better yet, a book, social Media's greatest double-edged sword is the

platform that provides us every human on earth with an electronic

device has access to their own globally broadcast microphone.

The mistake we make is thinking that just because we have access to this mic means

we have to use it, or that people should inherently care about what we have to say.

And because people feel this need, this obligation, or even this entitlement

to weigh in on absolutely everything, the internet becomes a clogged toilet.

It's full of crap.

This thoughtless embrace and propagation of hearsay as fact can have massive

implications in the real world.

There's perhaps no greater recent example of this than the conversation

surrounding the Israel Gaza War.

We were told the IDF bombed all Ahe Arab Hospital, except it didn't.

We were told there's a famine in Gaza, except there wasn't.

We were told Israel is an apartheid state.

It's not.

So how did these ideas become so widely accepted?

It starts at the top.

In the case of Allah Hill Hospital, for example, the media tripped over itself to

lay blame for the explosion at Israel's feet, basing their journalism entirely

off the hastily proffered word of Hamas.

You know, the terrorist organization that takes babies hostage and murders them.

Social media took the baton from there, and before you knew it, it was fact,

even though it wasn't, and even once the media retracted it, it was too late.

In the case of the famine, the announcement first came from

Doge Casualty, usaid, RIP, who erroneously based their conclusion

off misapplied data that was flat out denounced by the Global Famine Review

Committee, but the damage was done.

I. In both of those situations, the lies came from the top and were

then swept up so excitedly by an uninformed and uncritically thinking

public that they became ubiquitously accepted as fact, despite nobody

at any point having the actual knowledge of the situations reality.

As for the claims of apartheid, they certainly aren't coming from

actual Arabs living in Israel where they're allegedly being apartheid.

No, they come from somebody's friend who got it from his teacher, who got it from

an NGO, whose social media manager got it from an anti-Israel TikTok account.

A key part of the, how much do I really know about this question is where did

I actually receive this knowledge from?

Which leads me to an even more important question.

Who does this serve?

Again, simple but insightful.

Who does it serve for the world to believe Israel has blown up a

hospital or starved gaza's or promoted apartheid the enemies of Israel?

Who does it serve for Gaza to have restricted press so that

all access to information is funneled solely through Kamas?

A. What about the way social media algorithms silo us and shove

incendiary content down our throats?

Who does this serve?

I mean, look at TikTok.

What is the effect of having emotionally charged, politically

polarizing inflammatory content pushed onto your homepage discord chaos.

And who dis sewing deep political and social animosity within the

West serve the Chinese government who own the freaking app.

It shocks me that there isn't a government position where someone literally gets

on the news every morning and shouts.

TikTok is a Chinese scop built specifically to screw with America.

I dunno.

Maybe that was a job and he lawn fired him.

But I feel pretty confident that looking back on this prime example of American

folly is going to shock future historians.

They knew it was a Chinese manipulation and just kept using it Anyway.

Who does that serve?

I'll let you unentangle that one on your own.

Who does this serve?

How much do I really know about this?

These are the questions of the critically thinking.

Those of us more interested in working to get it right than just being right.

Try them out.

Let me know how it goes.

Just because the rest of the world acts within EGR doesn't mean we have to,

we can demand a personal standard of prudent and deliberate behavior online.

And IRL and in case you're wondering, yes, I know a good amount about this stuff.

And who does this monologue serve?

Hopefully you, this is the 33rd episode of being Jewish with me, Jonah Platt