GAZA CITY (THE WASHINGTON POST) – One week into the war in Gaza, social media is inducing a fog of war surpassing previous clashes in the region – one that’s shaping how panicked citizens and a global public view the conflict.
Social media has long played a critical role in battles in the area. During the 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in 2021, posts of carnage in Gaza rallied the public to the Palestinian cause. Researchers say increased internet access and the spread of smartphones enabled a watershed moment, revealing how tech platforms could show the horror and human toll of such events.
But now, a volatile, months-long fight over Israel’s democratic future has primed conspiracies and false information to spread within its borders. Tech platforms, diminished from waves of layoffs, have receded from policing falsehoods, disinformation and hate speech online. Electricity outages and strikes on telecommunications infrastructure in Gaza threaten Palestinians’ connectivity, according to human rights organisations.
While social media has been a critical tool for disseminating wartime information in recent days, a barrage of images, memes and testimonials is making it difficult to assess what is real. Activists in the region warn that viral horror stories that turn out not to be true may lead people to further distrust authority figures – and could spark hate, violence and retaliation against innocent people.
“I’m terrified,” Marwa Fatafta, a policy analyst at Al Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank and regional policy manager for the nonprofit digital human rights group Access Now. “There’s a lot of information being shared that is not verified, a lot of calls to violence and dehumanization. And all this is fanning the flames for further massacres (of Palestinians).”
Researchers have so far found only minimal evidence of disinformation originating abroad, said John Hultquist, chief analyst with the Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant.
Much misinformation about the war is directed inward.
Posts, videos and memes falsely claim that the attack stemmed from collusion between Hamas and Israel. In the 24 hours after the Hamas attack, the hashtag “TraitorsFromWithin” became the top trend on X, formerly Twitter, in Hebrew. Some threads posited that Palestinian citizen of Israel workers were stationed at the border fence, while others claimed the attack was orchestrated to push a peace deal with Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Months of protests over the country’s future, deep domestic polarisation and broad distrust of authorities have caused these theories to spread, said Achiya Schatz, director of FakeReporter, an Israeli watchdog organisation dedicated to fighting disinformation and hate speech online.
A Palestinian digital rights organisation called 7amleh says it has detected more than 19,000 cases of hate speech and violent incitement against Palestinians in the Hebrew language on X since October 7, the first day of escalations. The organisation’s executive director, Nadim Nashif, said he wasn’t able to flag the content to X because the organisation’s former points of contact at the company had been fired by Elon Musk, who has dramatically shrunk the company’s workforce since he took ownership last year.
To combat disinformation, FakeReporter is running a war room staffed with 2,500 volunteers across Israel. The volunteers flag and report suspicious, malicious, and graphic content to the platforms themselves, and FakeReporter also debunks misleading narratives on social media.
But over the last year, tech companies’ abilities to field these complaints has been compromised by waves of layoffs in units responsible for policing problematic content. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has laid off many members of a global operations team that monitors the platform, including Arabic speakers, according to a person familiar with the layoffs who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them. Under the leadership of Musk, X has fired the teams that acted as point people on the ground for advocates in the region. On Wednesday the European Union announced a probe into X for failures to moderate potentially illegal content and disinformation on its service.
Schatz said there is little communication from Meta-owned WhatsApp because the messaging platform is viewed as a private, encrypted service. And at X, he echoed Nashif’s account that, over the last year, “there has been no one to talk to” due to the firings. He said the company had reached out for the first time this week.
Mandiant’s Hultquist said that in comparison to the cacophony at the local level, foreign disinformation is, so far, playing a small role. He said that his team had detected fake accounts tied to Iran – whose leader has repeatedly called for the annihilation of Israel – posing as Egyptians across all social media platforms to celebrate Israel’s “humiliation.”
“Right now,” said Hultquist, “it’s very difficult for a lay person to get to ground truth.”
