Social media is the force that helped sway Arab countries into a wave of uprisings during the Arab Spring, and it's been the critical vehicle for on-the-ground citizen reporting. Thing is, plenty of other times, it's made us all look like idiots.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's assassination has been announced multiple times this year. Then there's Jordanian news website Soraya, who came under fire for falsely reporting that authorities had delivered a would-be Iraqi female suicide bomber to Daesh affiliates in Iraq for the exchange of the Jordanian pilot. The source of both intels? Tweets.
While not all are so glaring, the reality is journalists falls for bad social media tips all the time. And once a scoop gets released into the Twittersphere, it's not such an easy reverse.
The story
The western Swedish town of Trollhattan became the site of a brutal knife attack last Thursday, when a masked man wielding a sword stormed a school and slashed several people before being shot by police. Three people were killed in the incident — the attacker, one teacher and one injured student later in the hospital.
Authorities called the attack a hate crime, saying the 21-year-old assailant specifically targeted dark-skinned students, the Associated Press reported. Locals told the news agency racial tensions over an increased number of migrants in the city helped fuel the attacker.
But Arabic media was running with a different narrative for the better part of this week.
The blunder
Escalating tensions between Israelis and Palestinians seemed to be the problem behind the reporting blunder. Several Arabic-language news outlets reported the attack was on a Jewish school. Some linked it directly to the last month of ongoing violence engulfing Jerusalem, claiming this was evidence of the so-called Knife Intifada's global spread.
Palestine-based Arabic news site Al Watania, for example, headlined the story, "An Israeli teacher stabbed in an attack on a Jewish school in Sweden."
Sites started discreetly pulling the story as it became clear this was neither an attack on Israelis or Jews, but not before social media followed with declarations of its own. Here are a few:
مُلثم ينفذ عملية طعن داخل مدرسة يهودية في السويد والحديث عن ٥ اصابات خطيرة :)
— Mohamed Eldabous (@MEldabous) October 22, 2015A Masked man man performed a stabbing operation in a school for Jews in Sweden.
هالمرة عملية طعن بالسويد هاظ بيحكيلك قبل شوي واحد في السويد ملثم حامل سيف ونزل تمزيع في مجموعة يهود هناك ..... https://t.co/92NYW4r0Za
— Ayish Younis (@AyishYounis) October 22, 2015A masked man entered a school for Jews and killed four of them using a sword.
عاجل عملية طعن ليهود في السويد تكبيييير
— سفيان قديح (@sofyan_qodeeh) October 22, 2015Breaking: A masked man performed a stabbing operation on Jews in Sweden. Allah is great.
It's not the first time Palestinian media has been quick to glorify an attack. Reporting on alleged stabbings or shootings in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a major problem for those who aren't there to see it — and unfortunately, we don't always get the chance to debunk them.
By Alisa Reznick, Hayat Norimine
