The Twitter hashtag #gazaunderattack, which emerged as Israel launched Operation Protective Edge against the Palestinian territory earlier this month, was founded on the presumption that media are failing to report the story.
Graphic violent images of civilians under fire were posted in large numbers, suggesting that news organisations were turning a blind eye to the attacks. "The media are not reporting anything," was the hashtag's catch line.
But social media, especially in its treatment the Middle East, has become a minefield of propaganda and misinformation. Analysis by Abdirahim Saeed of BBC Arabic found that some of the pictures of violence circulated on the #gazaunderattack thread were recycled images from as long ago as 2007. Some were not even from Gaza at all but showed events from the ongoing conflict in Syria. Many of the pictures have since been distributed as the subjects of thousands of retweets.
"I didn't expect to get over 1,800 retweets - I didn't actually know that the picture was recycled," one 16-year-old Twitter user told the BBC. "People don't need to take it as a literal account. If you think of bombs going off, that's pretty much what it looks like."
Chris Hamilton, social media editor at the BBC, said media organisations were using reverse image search facilities - which show if a photo has previously been published online - to determine the provenance of pictures.
