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The incentives of social media have long been perverse. But in recent weeks, platforms have become virtually unusable for people seeking accurate information.

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The sociopaths among us—and how to avoid them MAGA Bluey is stressing people out. What Sidney Powell’s plea deal could mean for the Fulton County case against Trump Hamas’s hostage-taking handbook says to “kill the difficult ones” and use hostages as “human shields.”

Dangerous Incentives

“For following the war in real-time,” Elon Musk declared to his 150 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) the day after Israel declared war on Hamas, two accounts were worth checking out. He tagged them in his post, which racked up some 11 million views. Three hours later, he deleted the post; both accounts were known spreaders of disinformation, including the claim this spring that there was an explosion near the Pentagon. Musk, in his capacity as the owner of X, has personally sped up the deterioration of social media as a place to get credible information. Misinformation and violent rhetoric run rampant on X, but other platforms have also quietly rolled back their already lacking attempts at content moderation and leaned into virality, in many cases at the cost of reliability.

Social media has long encouraged the sharing of outrageous content. Posts that stoke strong reactions are rewarded with reach and amplification. But, my colleague Charlie Warzel told me, the Israel-Hamas war is also “an awful conflict that has deep roots … I am not sure that anything that’s happened in the last two weeks requires an algorithm to boost outrage.” He reminded me that social-media platforms have never been the best places to look if one’s goal is genuine understanding: “Over the past 15 years, certain people (myself included) have grown addicted to getting news live from the feed, but it’s a remarkably inefficient process if your end goal is to make sure you have a balanced and comprehensive understanding of a specific event.”

Where social media shines, Charlie said, is in showing users firsthand perspectives and real-time updates. But the design and structure of the platforms are starting to weaken even those capabilities. “In recent years, all the major social-media platforms have evolved further into algorithmically driven TikTok-style recommendation engines,” John Herrman wrote last week in New York Magazine. Now a toxic brew of bad actors and users merely trying to juice engagement have seeded social media with dubious, and at times dangerous, material that’s designed to go viral.

Musk has also introduced financial incentives for posting content that provokes massive engagement: Users who pay for a Twitter Blue subscription (in the U.S., it costs $8 a month) can in turn get paid for posting content that generates a lot of views from other subscribers, be it outrageous lies, old clips repackaged as wartime footage, or something else that might grab eyeballs. The accounts of those Twitter Blue subscribers now display a blue check mark—once an authenticator of a person’s real identity, now a symbol of fealty to Musk.

If some of the changes making social-media platforms less hospitable to accurate information are obvious to users, others are happening more quietly inside companies. Musk slashed the company’s trust-and-safety team, which handled content moderation, soon after he took over last year. Caitlin Chin-Rothmann, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me in an email that Meta and YouTube have also made cuts to their trust-and-safety teams as part of broader layoffs in the past year. The reduction in moderators on social-media sites, she said, leaves the platforms with “fewer employees who have the language, cultural, and geopolitical understanding to make the tough calls in a crisis.” Even before the layoffs, she added, technology platforms struggled to moderate content that was not in English. After making widely publicized investments in content moderation under intense public pressure after the 2016 presidential election, platforms have quietly dialed back their capacities. This is happening at the same time as these same platforms have deprioritized the surfacing of legitimate news by reputable sources via their algorithms (see also: Musk’s decision to strip out the headlines that were previously displayed on X if a user shared a link to another website).

Content moderation is not a panacea. And violent videos and propaganda have been spreading beyond major platforms, on Hamas-linked Telegram channels, which are private groups that are effectively unmoderated. On mainstream sites, some of the less-than-credible posts have come directly from politicians and government officials. But experts told me that efforts to ramp up moderation—especially investments in moderators with language and cultural competencies—would improve the situation.

The extent of inaccurate information on social media in recent weeks has attracted attention from regulators, particularly in Europe, where there are different standards—both cultural and legal—regarding free speech compared with the United States. The European Union opened an inquiry into X earlier this month regarding “indications received by the Commission services of the alleged spreading of illegal content and disinformation, in particular the spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech.” In an earlier letter in response to questions from the EU, Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, wrote that X had labeled or removed “tens of thousands of pieces of content”; removed hundreds of Hamas-affiliated accounts; and was relying, in part, on “community notes,” written by eligible users who sign up as contributors, to add context to content on the site. Today, the European Commission sent letters to Meta and TikTok requesting information about how they are handling disinformation and illegal content. (X responded to my request for comment with “busy now, check back later.” A spokesperson for YouTube told me that the company had removed tens of thousands of harmful videos, adding, “Our teams are working around the clock to monitor for harmful footage and remain vigilant.” A spokesperson for TikTok directed me to a statement about how it is ramping up safety and integrity efforts, adding that the company had heard from the European Commission today and would publish its first transparency report under the European Digital Services Act next week. And a spokesperson for Meta told me, “After the terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israel, we quickly established a special operations center staffed with experts, including fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers, to closely monitor and respond to this rapidly evolving situation.” The spokesperson added that the company will respond to the European Commission.)

Social-media platforms were already imperfect, and during this conflict, extremist groups are making sophisticated use of their vulnerabilities. The New York Times reported that Hamas, taking advantage of X’s weak content moderation, have seeded the site with violent content such as audio of a civilian being kidnapped. Social-media platforms are providing “a near-frictionless experience for these terrorist groups,” Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which is currently facing a lawsuit from Twitter over its research investigating hate speech on the platform, told me. By paying Musk $8 a month, he added, “you’re able to get algorithmic privilege and amplify your content faster than the truth can put on its pajamas and try to combat it.”

Related:

This war shows just how broken social media has become. How to redeem social media

Today’s News

After saying he would back interim House Speaker Patrick McHenry and postpone a third vote on his own candidacy, Representative Jim Jordan now says he will push for another round of voting. Sidney Powell, a former attorney for Donald Trump, has pleaded guilty in the Georgia election case. The Russian American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva has been detained in Russia, according to her employer, for allegedly failing to register as a foreign agent.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Hickey

The Annoyance Economy

By Annie Lowrey

Has the American labor market ever been better? Not in my lifetime, and probably not in yours, either. The jobless rate is just 3.8 percent. Employers added a blockbuster 336,000 jobs in September. Wage growth exceeded inflation too. But people are weary and angry. A majority of adults believe we’re tipping into a recession, if we are not in one already. Consumer confidence sagged in September, and the public’s expectations about where things are heading drooped as well.

The gap between how the economy is and how people feel things are going is enormous, and arguably has never been bigger. A few well-analyzed factors seem to be at play, the dire-toned media environment and political polarization among them. To that list, I want to add one more: something I think of as the “Economic Annoyance Index.” Sometimes, people’s personal financial situations are just stressful—burdensome to manage and frustrating to think about—beyond what is happening in dollars-and-cents terms. And although economic growth is strong and unemployment is low, the Economic Annoyance Index is riding high.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Alfred Gescheidt / Getty; Getty

Read. “Explaining Pain,” a new poem by Donald Platt:

“The way I do it is to say my body / is not my / body anymore. It is someone else’s. The pain, therefore, / is no longer / mine.”

Listen. A ground invasion in Gaza seems all but certain, Hanna Rosin discusses in the latest episode of Radio Atlantic. But then what?

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Working as a content moderator can be brutal. In 2019, Casey Newton wrote a searing account in The Verge of the lives of content moderators, who spend their days sifting through violent, hateful posts and, in many cases, work as contractors receiving relatively low pay. We Had to Remove This Post, a new novel by the Dutch writer Hanna Bervoets, follows one such “quality assurance worker,” who reviews posts on behalf of a social-media corporation. Through this character, we see one expression of the human stakes of witnessing so much horror. Both Newton and Bervoets explore the idea that, although platforms rely on content moderators’ labor, the work of keeping brutality out of users’ view can be devastating for those who do it.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Since taking office, Vice President Kamala Harris has struggled to communicate her vision and the nature of her role to both the press and the public. As President Joe Biden, the country’s oldest-ever president, eyes reelection, questions about Harris’s readiness to step in as president if needed are urgent, if also seemingly taboo among Democrats. My colleague Elaina Plott Calabro profiled Harris for the November issue of The Atlantic, following her to Africa and around the U.S.—and even, in a first for a reporter during this administration, to the vice president’s residence. I called Elaina to discuss Harris’s public persona, why she’s had trouble communicating her success, and what she’s like outside Washington, D.C.

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Trouble Breaking Through

Lora Kelley: You write in your profile that, at earlier points in Harris’s career, “communication wasn’t a matter of rhetoric. It was just laying out the facts.” Now she’s in an arena where compelling rhetoric counts. Why has that transition been difficult for her?

Elaina Plott Calabro: Earlier in her career, Kamala Harris was a prosecutor in Alameda County and a district attorney in San Francisco. You are not looking to your DA for sweeping, inspiring speeches in the way you might, say, your U.S. senator. Communication as DA is so much more technical and fact-based. As Harris has gotten further away from that level of politics and moved onto a national stage, she’s found it more difficult to frame her communication in a way that captures the tangible nature of her success.

It’s not just Harris who is having trouble breaking through to voters right now. This is something that President Biden is struggling with as well. One prominent Democratic pollster recently told me that they’re mystified about what it takes to reach Americans at a communications level. In this post-2016 era, a lot of politicians, not just Harris, are struggling with how to achieve visibility in a time when Donald Trump can say one thing and it seems to dominate the airwaves for days.

Lora: In what contexts does Harris thrive?

Elaina: When Harris can talk one-on-one with people, hear their concerns and stress the ways in which her administration is working for them, and then bring what she’s learned back to Washington, that’s where she feels most effective and comes into her own as a politician. We’ve seen her do a lot more of that lately.

In one of the most telling conversations I had with her, she told me about a commencement speech that she once gave at the law school at UC Berkeley. She urged the students there to “embrace the mundane.” One reason that she doesn’t have a public presentation that immediately captivates people is that she sees her job as something that takes more than theatrics to do right. She takes seriously—and prefers to spend her time on—the slower-burn, day-to-day work she feels is needed to actually effect change.

Lora: You observed that Harris tends to play especially well outside of Washington. Why is that?

Elaina: In Washington, we tend to have a pretty static idea of what it means for a vice president to be successful. It’s obviously a very nebulous role, but if you look back at old headlines from past administrations, news outlets would often frame vice presidents as sort of the liaison to Capitol Hill for the White House.

Kamala Harris was never going to be Joe Biden’s anchor to Washington. President Biden started his first Senate term before she was even 10 years old. So her first several months on the job, she was also trying to figure out what role she could play. Once she was able to start getting out into the rest of the country, she came into her own. On the trail, she connects very visibly with regular people. She’s very warm and personable. When she’s actually on the ground with voters, she comes across as an entirely different politician from the existing caricature of her as someone unsure of herself who speaks in word-salad locutions.

Lora: You wrote that “perceptions of Harris appear to be frozen in 2021.” Do you think there’s anything she can or will do to change the way that people perceive her ahead of 2024?

Elaina: Kamala Harris had not been on the national stage for that long when she entered the White House. The Lester Holt interview she did in 2021 was very defining for her simply because it was one of the first major yardsticks by which people could measure her. The narrative that came out of that interview, in which she was viewed as unprepared and flippant, became really hard for her to get out from under. As one of her former aides told me, narrative is a very difficult thing to change.

Her willingness to talk with me, and to invite me to the residence, was emblematic of a desire on the part of her team to get her out there and engage more with the press as the campaign gets under way. They’re putting her in a position where more Americans are seeing her, and trying to create moments that can define the shape of her vice presidency, two and a half years after the one moment that has otherwise largely defined it.

Related:

The Kamala Harris problem The woman who led Kamala Harris to this moment

Today’s News

In a landmark move, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and National Unity leader Benny Gantz have agreed to establish an emergency wartime government. Republicans have narrowly nominated Representative Steve Scalise as speaker of the House; a full vote on the House floor has been delayed. Hurricane Lidia made landfall in Mexico as a Category 4 storm yesterday evening.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The Mississippi is losing its fight with the ocean, Nancy Walecki writes. A combination of drought and sea-level rise has sent a wedge of salt water moving up the river.

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Evening Read

Getty / The Atlantic

Cancel Amazon Prime

(From 2021)

By Ellen Cushing

Today is Prime Day. Imagine trying to explain that to an alien or to a time traveler from the 20th century. “Amazon turned 20 and on the eve of its birthday, the company introduced Prime Day, a global shopping event,” reads Amazon’s formal telling of the ritual’s 2015 origins. “Our only goal? Offer a volume of deals greater than Black Friday, exclusively for Prime members.” The holiday was invented by a corporation in honor of itself, to enrich itself. It has existed for six years and is observed by tens of millions of people worldwide. I hope you are spending it with your loved ones.

Prime Day is a singular and strange artifact, but then again, so is Prime, Amazon’s $119-a-year membership service, which buys subscribers free one-day shipping, plus access to streaming media, discounts at the Amazon subsidiary Whole Foods, and a host of other perks. Prime is Amazon’s greatest and most terrifying invention: a product whose value proposition is to help you buy more products.

Read the full article.

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Read. A new biography of the Velvet Underground founder Lou Reed considers the stark duality of the man and his music.

Listen. “Be absolutely quiet. Not a word.” In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin talks with the Israeli journalist Amir Tibon about his family’s encounter with Hamas.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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In much of the United States, you can already feel it. There’s a hint of a chill in the night air. The morning light looks somehow more golden. The pumpkin-spice latte has finished its annual transit across the cosmos and returned to its home at your local Starbucks. Sweater weather approaches. Cooler temperatures bring rich textures and many layering opportunities. What this time of year no longer brings to most people, though, is amazing new sweaters. Or even good ones.

With apologies for describing a tweet, the comedian Ellory Smith made much the same point a few weeks ago on the platform formerly known as Twitter: With side-by-side photos of Billy Crystal wearing an ivory cable-knit fisherman sweater in 1989’s When Harry Met Sally and the actor Ben Schwartz re-creating the image in a similar outfit, Smith sounded an alarm: “The quality of sweaters has declined so greatly in the last twenty years that I think it genuinely necessitates a national conversation.” Her tweet racked up a couple hundred thousand likes because she’s exactly right. So let’s have that conversation.

The phenomenon that Smith is alluding to is clear from the photos, even if you’ve never before had a single thought about the state of American knitwear. Crystal’s sweater is timeless and lush—fuzzy, generously cut, and extravagantly cabled, with a tall collar and close-fitting cuffs designed to keep warmth in. Schwartz’s sweater is roughly the same color, and it is indeed a cabled sweater, but that’s about where the comparison ends. Some of the differences are intentional, and not necessarily bad—it’s designed to fit closer to the body than Crystal’s, and the detailing is more varied. But Schwartz’s sweater also has an odd sheen, flat cabling, and loose cuffs. It lacks the heft of Crystal’s version; it looks cheaper. It was probably machine knit. Crystal’s is more likely to have been handmade. This is despite the fact that, by the mass-market standards of 2023, Schwartz’s sweater is a nice sweater. It appears to be a Polo Ralph Lauren design that costs almost $400.

As the sheer quantity of clothing available to the average American has grown over the past few decades, everything feels at least a little bit flimsier than it used to. Seams unravel after a couple of washes, garments lose their shape more quickly, shoes have to be replaced more frequently. The situation might be the worst in knitwear. Good sweaters, gloves, beanies, and scarves are all but gone from mass-market retailers. The options that have replaced them lose their fluff faster, feel fake, and either keep their wearers too hot or let the winter wind whip right through them. Sometimes they even smell like plastic.

The most obvious indication of these changes is printed on a garment’s fiber-content tag. Knits used to be made entirely from natural fibers. These fibers usually came from shearing sheep, goats, alpacas, and other animals. Sometimes, plant-derived fibers such as cotton or linen were blended in. Now, according to Imran Islam, a textile-science professor and knit expert at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the overwhelming majority of yarn used in mass-market knitwear is blended with some type of plastic. Most commonly, this means polyester, polyamide, or acrylic. Islam and I spoke on one of the first chilly fall days in New York, and he had just finished conducting an informal test as part of a knitting lesson: He asked the students who had come to class wearing a sweater to check what it was made out of. Every sweater, he said, had some plastic in it.

Jared Bartman / The Atlantic. Sources: Alamy; Getty

Knits made with synthetic fiber are cheaper to produce. They can be spun up in astronomical quantities to meet the sudden whims of clothing manufacturers—there’s no waiting for whole flocks of sheep to get fluffy enough to hand shear. They also usually can be tossed in your washing machine with everything else. But by virtually every measure, synthetic fabrics are far inferior. They pill quickly, sometimes look fake, shed microplastics, and don’t perform as well as wool when worn. Sweaters are functional garments, not just fashionable ones. Wool keeps its wearer warm without steaming them like a baked potato wrapped in foil. Its fibers are hygroscopic and hydrophobic, which means they draw moisture to their center and leave the surface dry. A wool sweater can absorb a lot of water from the air around it before it feels wet or cold to the touch, which goes a long way toward explaining why high-quality wool sweaters are still made in particularly damp, cold regions of the world, including Scotland and New Zealand.

Some major retailers do continue to carry all-wool sweaters. If you’re fastidious about checking tags, you’re sure to find them once in a while. But don’t rely on price to guide you. A significant amount of polyamide or acrylic is now common in sweaters with four-digit price tags. A $3,200 Gucci “wool cardigan,” for example, is actually half polyamide when you read the fine print. Cheaper materials have crept into the fashion industry’s output gradually, as more and more customers have become inured to them. In the beginning, these changes were motivated primarily by the price pressures of fast fashion, Islam said: As low-end brands have created global networks that pump out extremely cheap, disposable clothing, more premium brands have attempted to keep up with the frenetic pace while still maximizing profits, which means cutting costs and cutting corners. Islam estimates that a pound of sheep’s wool as a raw material might cost from $1.50 to $2. A pound of cashmere might cost anywhere from $10 to $15. A pound of acrylic, meanwhile, can be had for less than $1.

To make matters worse for people who just want to buy a decent sweater, Islam said that few checks and balances exist to ensure that knitwear marketed as, say, pure cashmere or merino wool actually is, unless a brand voluntarily adheres to a high standard of traceability. Retailers rarely face penalties for driving materials costs as low as possible, even if it means that sweaters don’t look and feel quite as nice as they once did. And they don’t need to. When almost all of your competitors are using the same sad plastic blends, no one is going to single your company out for being particularly miserly with the materials.

This race to the bottom had been going on for years, but it accelerated considerably in 2005, Sofi Thanhauser, the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, told me. That year was the end of the Multifiber Arrangement, a trade agreement that had for three decades capped imports of textile products and yarn into the United States, Canada, and the European Union from developing countries. Once Western retailers no longer had meaningful restrictions on where they could source their garments from, many of them went shopping for the cheapest inventory possible. They found it largely in Asian and Latin American countries with few protections for garment workers or environmental regulations on the textile industry, which allowed them to slash wages and use more synthetics.

That changed the unit economics of mass-market fashion—and of sweaters—in profound ways. According to Islam, if you push down retail prices with cheap labor, they’ll no longer bear the use of quality materials. If you push down retail prices with cheap materials, they’ll no longer bear the wages of garment workers with more skill and experience. If you push down both as much as possible, you stand a pretty good chance of gaining market share. Either way, the conditions of the industry and the products on the shelf degrade in tandem. Knitting, in particular, is highly skilled labor, even at its cheapest. For genuinely impressive detailing and finishing, Islam said, manufacturers need to pay up for highly experienced workers. When manufacturers forgo those costs, designs get simpler—they get boring. And when demand for that kind of skilled labor craters, those skills aren’t passed to new workers, and they eventually wash out of the labor force. The same thing happens in production of the raw materials necessary to make a better-quality garment. Eventually, even if your company wants to produce something nice, durable, and well made, your ability to do so at all—let alone at a price that anyone will pay—is greatly reduced.

The majority of clothing sold in the U.S. now includes at least some plastic content. Brands generally rely on consumers not to be interested enough in fabric content to check the tags before buying. But Thanhauser said brands have also gotten more adept at marketing synthetic fabrics as a consumer advantage, whether or not they actually are in any particular garment. They do enable more sweaters to be labeled as machine washable, she said, and the popularity of “performance” fabrics in athleisure has helped improve the public perception of all kinds of synthetic textiles, even if those materials offer few advantages outside of the athletic pursuits for which they were designed.

Over time, these phenomena become self-reinforcing. Hand-washing and line-drying a few garments is no longer a normal part of laundry day in many homes, Thanhauser pointed out. Once the apparel market changes so much that those kinds of care tasks are more of a nuisance than a necessity, people avoid garments that require them. These market changes also reflect other shifts in how people live, suspects Andre West, a former knitwear manufacturer and a professor at the North Carolina State University Wilson College of Textiles. Wool is most comfortable and effective when layered, especially for relatively affordable wool sweaters, which tend not to be super soft. Life has gotten more casual for most Americans over the past 50 years, and a button-down with a sweater on top now exceeds the expectations of many office dress codes and can feel a little formal to people more accustomed to T-shirts or polos. Indoor climate control has also gotten more sophisticated. People spend less time in drafty old buildings and more time at a constant 72 degrees. Outside, the country’s temperatures are trending warmer, and more people are moving south.

The end result of all of this—the changes to trade regulation, the decline in garment-industry wages and working conditions, the rise of synthetic textiles—is abundance, but only by a definition of the word that includes an abundance of junk. A good sweater is hard to find, but it’s not impossible. People are still raising heritage-breed sheep and spinning pure wool yarn and knitting sweaters that look and feel and perform a lot like the ones that were de rigueur a couple of generations ago. You can find them if you’re fastidious about checking fiber-content tags, and if you can pay prices that reflect the value of the materials and skill that went into their creation.

That doesn’t always mean paying far more than big retailers demand for polyester blends. O’Connell’s, a Buffalo, New York–based clothing store that’s famous among American sweater lovers, sells a beautiful, Irish-made fisherman sweater in pure wool for $198—half the price of the cheaper-looking Polo blend that Schwartz appears to wear in his When Harry Met Sally reenactment. Scotland-based Jamieson’s of Shetland will sell you beautiful wool sweaters in the same price range, or the yarn they manufacture so you can make your own. At the very high end, Silicon Valley tech moguls obsess over four-figure Loro Piana and Brunello Cucinelli sweaters as important status symbols. For everyone else, plenty of garments gesture at what used to be widely available, but few hold a candle to the garments that were once the norm. And, in fact, please don’t get candles too close to a poly blend, which is much more likely than wool to go up in flames.

More accounts are emerging of kidnappings, rapes, and torture committed by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians. So far, at least 150 Israelis, most of them apparently civilians, were kidnapped by Hamas gunmen and stolen across Israel’s border with Gaza. Among the kidnapped are elderly women and small children. Human-rights groups are tracking these kidnappings as evidence of war crimes.

Within hours of the attacks on Saturday, photos and videos began to circulate showing the mass murder of Israeli civilians—including people killed in their cars, and left dead on the ground in the streets and at a bus stop—as well as the kidnapping of children, young women, and the elderly. Two widely circulated videos have sparked outrage because of the apparent sexual assaults they depict, The Times of Israel reports.

One video shows a woman who appears to have been beaten, and who seems to be bleeding into her shorts, being forced out of a Jeep in Gaza. The other video shows a woman, later identified by her family as 22-year-old Shani Louk, stripped down to her underwear and lying face down in a truck, her legs twisted at unnatural angles. Hamas gunmen sit on her body, and bystanders spit on it. According to The Washington Post, Louk was kidnapped at a music festival where Hamas killed at least 260 people. Tablet magazine reports that many of the women executed at the festival were raped “next to their friends’ bodies, dead bodies” before being killed. Some of those who survived were kidnapped and seen “paraded through the city’s streets” in Gaza by their captors, “blood gushing from between their legs,” Tablet reported.

Palestinians transport a captured Israeli civilian (<i>center</i>) from Kibbutz Kfar Azza to the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. (Hatem Ali / AP) Palestinians transport a captured Israeli civilian (center) from Kibbutz Kfar Azza to the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. (Hatem Ali / AP) Palestinians lead a reportedly captured and injured Israeli man in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on October 7, 2023. (AFP via Getty) Palestinians transport a captured Israeli civilian (center) from Kibbutz Kfar Azza to the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. (Hatem Ali / AP) Palestinians transport a captured Israeli civilian (center) from Kibbutz Kfar Azza to the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. (Hatem Ali / AP) Noa Argamani, 25, is seen being kidnapped by a Hamas terrorist on October 7, 2023. A family member confirmed Argamani’s identity to The New York Times. (Screengrab from X via Hananya Naftali) Screengrab from X via Benjamin Strick