Reuters Institute
Shayan Sardarizadeh is a senior journalist covering disinformation, extremism and conspiracy theories for BBC Monitoring’s disinformation team as part of BBC Verify. Since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, he’s debunked dozens of misleading visuals on social media and published his findings on widely read threads on Twitter, now known as X.

As the decades-long conflict between Israel and Hamas enters a new phase, I spoke with Sardarizadeh to learn more about his work and about the kind of misleading visuals he and his colleagues have encountered in the last few days. Our conversation covered the spike in misinformation on several platforms, the pernicious influence of the latest changes on X, and the marginal role AI-generated visuals have played in this context. Our discussion has been edited for brevity and clarity. MORE