There are some anonymous conspiracy theory accounts popping up that allege that Gaza Verified is a scam and that everyone verified by us is a scammer.
Some of the outrageous claims made by these accounts include:
• They can’t be real because there is no Internet access in Gaza (there is, although it is unreliable and spotty).
• They can’t be real because everyone in Gaza is dead (seriously, one of them actually said this).
• And, showcasing just horrible and lacking of basic humanity these people are, there is a recent one that assets that Aseel ( @aseelfromgz) – one of our team members¹ – is impersonating a Palestinian woman from Gaza who was murdered in Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. (This particularly nasty and personal conspiracy theory uses the image of a different Aseel – think “Mary” or “Jane” in the West – as its “proof”).
While we don’t post our verification videos to respect the privacy of our friends in Gaza, we did record the one we held Friday with @shahedgaza that Aseel was helping us run and, with her permission, are posting it here and pinning it to our account so you can see what our verification calls are actually like.
If you see posts by these conspiracy theorists (a few of them have “Linux” in their handles), please report and block them.
If you are running a Mastodon server and you allow such conspiracy theorists on your servers, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Please report servers that do not take action on such accounts after they are reported to them to the #fediblock tag so they can be blocked/defederated with on the server-level by servers run by decent human beings.
Thank you.
💕