We've been posting our way through the Israel-Hamas war. But should we be?

• Social media has been rife with disturbing images and hot takes since the Hamas terror attacks in Israel.
• But experts say social media is ill-suited for conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
• The prioritization of user engagement means extreme takes and misinformation can easily spread.

The past six days on social media have been a heartbreaking and deeply disturbing experience.

Videos of young Israelis taken hostage, begging for their lives. Accounts of kibbutzim littered with the bodies of babies and the elderly killed by Hamas militants. Photos of Gazan children covered in blood and the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israel's counterattacks carried through the demolished neighborhoods.

And to add to the devastation, blatant misinformation, and countless hot takes are shared and reshared, often by people who may not actually know much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Such takes are the norm on social media. But this moment especially highlights the limitations of trying to make sense of a 75-year-old conflict by reading an infographic that was designed to evoke an emotional response and provide an illusion of moral clarity.

"It's the shortcut and the dumbing down of a situation that's been complicated since 1947," Alison Dagnes, a political scientist and professor in political media at Shippensburg University, told Insider of the short online takes that often get widely shared. "A situation that nobody has ever been able to solve. It's not suited for a medium where there's only room for the most brief, emotional, visceral reaction."

Dagnes said the nature of social media and the attention economy means that there is a financial incentive on behalf of the platforms to keep users scrolling, clicking, commenting. And it's often the controversial, hot takes that get higher engagement — and therefore get shared or served up to more users.

It's much easier, and emotionally appealing, to clearly define the good guys and the bad guys and leave it at that, she said. But that's exactly the problem.

"Trying to explain the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in one picture is almost like a Second City sketch. It's like 'Name That Tune,' but with one note. You can't do it," she said. "It's an impossible task, to take something so nuanced and so complicated and turn it into something that's simple enough to digest quickly."

"The stuff that's good and real and thoughtful is boring," she continued.

Polarization and misinformation are common on social media

Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, agreed that social media does not lend itself to useful conversations on the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and Saturday's Hamas terror attack that killed at least 1,300, and Israel's brutal response in Gaza that has killed at least 1,400 are no exception.

"In a social media world, the impulse is to reach a conclusion based on your emotions and share it with the world as quickly and ferociously as you can," he told Insider.

Before social media, conversations like this would typically happen over coffee or at the workplace — likely still with some disagreement. But due to social media's ability to supercharge every take and exchange, he said, "Everyone who comments on this is convinced they're right and anyone who expresses another opinion is morally corrupt."

Social media can of course be used to spread important information or raise awareness about issues that have been ignored by the broader public.

But many social media users fall victim to misinformation, which has spread like wildfire even in the first week of this war. Users also often fail to question how informed the writer of any particular post actually is.

Dagnes said that just by virtue of posting something, anyone can be an expert to social media users — never mind that person's actual qualifications or life experience. So even if people are engaging more with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they're often engaging with posts that are false, misleading, or simply omit relevant information.

"Social media's greatest strength is thus its original sin: These sites are excellent at making you feel connected and informed, frequently at the expense of actually being informed," Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic on Thursday. "That's to say nothing of the psychological toll that comes from staring at the raw feed."

Posting is easier than actually learning about the conflict or listening to victims

The reality is that if you, as an individual, have not paid attention to the conflict before now, you do not have to post or share a big take on what led to this moment or what should happen going forward. In an op-ed for MSNBC, Rachel E. Greenspan, who is Jewish, wrote that she did not expect anyone, her Jewish and non-Jewish friends alike, to post anything about the war.

"In reality, there are no points to be accrued by Instagram Stories. There are no winnings for those who post the most widely approved infographics, no penalties for those who choose not to post," she wrote. "Given all the horrible events that are happening in the world at any given moment, if there were such penalties, then each of us would lose — every single day."

Greenspan noted that not posting is a privilege, one that the victims of this war may not share. But instead of posting something that you don't fully understand, you can instead choose to listen — to experts, to the voices of Israelis and Palestinians — and try to learn.

"Tweeting takes four seconds of your time," Paulson said. "Understanding meaningfully what's happening in the Middle East can take years."