How do you know what Israel-Hamas footage you can trust?

Disinformation is a problem on all social media platforms, but X is thought to be one of the worst offenders, as ITV News' George Hancorn reports

Tens of millions of videos are posted on social media sites every day - and that number has soared since Hamas launched its deadly attack on Israel.

X, formerly Twitter, is awash with accounts and videos claiming to be legitimate but with closer inspection, many videos are either out-of-date or completely fake.

Bellingcat recently reported a series of now-debunked videos that appeared over the weekend, claiming to show the attacks unfold.

They found a series of accounts on X reporting to be 'verified' or from legitimate sources. It's now been found that this was not the case.

One video claimed to show a church in Gaza had been blown up by Israel - this was debunked by fact-checkers and the church even responded.

In a post they said: "Our beloved brothers in the Lord, we inform you that the church of St. Porferius in Gaza is in the best condition. The news you spread is nothing more than rumors."

Another video, which Full Fact recently debunked, claimed to show a rocket attack on Israel by Hamas.

Bellingcat found X was one of the worst platforms for unverified content, largely due to the tens of millions of videos regularly being posted on the site.

And the European Union’s digital enforcer wrote to Elon Musk about misinformation and “potentially illegal content” on X, in what’s shaping up to be one of the first major tests for the 27-nation bloc’s new digital rules aimed at cleaning up social media platforms.

X said it has a strict policy on misinformation.

Under its 'synthetic and manipulated media policy', X explains: "Posts that share misleading media are subject to removal."

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also received a letter from the EU on Tuesday, informing him there has been a "surge of illegal content and disinformation" on Meta platforms and called for him to take action immediately.

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The same problems arose during the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with several videos being edited and repurposed claiming to be new when they were, in fact, from a different year altogether.

ITV News is one of many news organisations which regularly verifies footage before it is broadcast. Security Producer Dan Howells has explained how the process works.

"Verifying the location is a really important starting point, as this helps to provide the context of the video footage," says Dan.

"We look for landmarks we can identify, whether that be distinctive buildings, or something geographical. We can do this by looking at satellite images of the location, or other still images or videos of the same place that we find online, to see if they match up."

There are also major challenges that come with verifying such large amounts of footage, especially on social sites.

"The biggest challenges come from deliberate attempts to mislead people - disinformation," says Dan.

Some social media users will deliberately post old footage, or even footage from other conflicts, to provide some narrative spin that might suit some agenda.

The producer adds: "Attempts to mislead people can come from official sources too, so it's always important to question everything that we see.

"Ultimately if we're not sure, we won't use it. "