As false information about the rapidly changing war between Gaza Strip militants and Israel proliferated on the social media platform X over the weekend, owner Elon Musk personally recommended that users follow accounts notorious for promoting lies.

"For following the war in real-time, WarMonitor & sentdefender are good," Musk posted on the platform formerly called Twitter on Sunday morning to 150 million accounts. That post was viewed 11 million times in three hours, drawing thanks from those two accounts before Musk deleted it.

Both were among the most important early spreaders of a false claim in May that there had been an explosion near the White House. The Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index dropped 85 points before that story was debunked.

Emerson T. Brooking, a researcher at the Atlantic Council Digital Forensics Research Lab, posted that sentdefender is an "absolutely poisonous account regularly posting wrong and unverifiable things ... inserting random editorialization and trying to juice its paid subscriber count."

The WarMonitor account has argued with others over Israel and religion, posting a year ago that "the overwhelming majority of people in the media and banks are zionists" and telling a correspondent in June to "go worship a jew lil bro."

Researchers said the new conflict was an early test of how the revamped X conveys accurate data during a major crisis, and that the immediate impression was poor.

"Anecdotal evidence that X is failing this...

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