Over the past 15 years, Twitter — now X — has become pivotal to how we understand crises. From the Arab Spring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, now, the conflict between Israel and Hamas, X is the first platform to which many people turn to understand and report on rapidly unfolding events.

Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform has fundamentally changed it, and anyone relying on X to understand the conflict between Israel and Hamas has encountered a very different platform, one dominated by a new generation of so-called open source intelligence analysts with very different conventions for verifying information than mainstream media outlets.

Mike Caulfield, a research scientist leading rapid response efforts at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, joins the show to discuss his research on what he has dubbed a “new elite” of posters that are reaching huge audiences with a high volume of posts of raw conflict footage.