Often the problem lies in the details. Hamas killed dozens of Israelis, including children, in an attack in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz near Gaza. A French television correspondent’s unverified report that 40 babies were beheaded in the attack went viral on social media as if it were fact. The report remains unconfirmed. It even seeped into a statement by President Biden that he had seen photographs of that particular horror, prompting the White House to walk back his remarks a bit, saying the information had come from news accounts.

Hamas has adroitly exploited social media to promote its cause the way Al Qaeda and the Islamic State once did. It used the Telegram app, which is largely unfiltered, as a conduit to push celebratory and graphic images of its incursion from Gaza into broader circulation on social networks that have barred terrorist organizations.

Increasingly, our digitized lives have become an information battleground, with every side in any conflict vying to offer its version. Old images have been recycled to make a new point. At the same time, actual images have been disputed as fakes, including a bloody photograph that Donald J. Trump Jr., the former president’s son, shared on X.

Reliable news organizations used to function as curators, verifying information and contextualizing it, and they still do. Nevertheless, some have sought to question their reliability as gatekeepers, most prominently Elon Musk, the owner of X.

The day after the fighting in Israel erupted, Mr. Musk shared a post on X encouraging his followers to trust the platform more than mainstream media, recommending two accounts that have been notorious for spreading false claims. (Mr. Musk later deleted the post but not before it had been seen millions of times.)