Why Israel must win the social media battle

Someone in the Arab world figured out, a long time ago, that the first line of defense in any battle is the garnering of public opinion. Win that, and everything else is easy by comparison.

That’s why Al Jazeera was launched back in 1996, an Arab news outlet that became the greatest propaganda tool in the Arab world. Of course, in recent years, influencers have also employed the avenue of social media, impacting how we think, what gets spread around, and ultimately, what passes for truth.

Well-known platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, have literally become the battlefields for the mind as they attempt to provide information and, more often, disinformation about what’s going on from their own skewed perspective. Along with their reports are the ever-present accompanying pictures, meant to sear the conscience and paint a very lopsided picture of how war is being waged. Context and background are all irrelevant in the war of propaganda, while viewers are easily manipulated by what looks authentic and irrefutable.

But, while no one is disavowing death, it’s also essential, in one’s quest to get at the truth, to know exactly how someone died. Was it at the hands of the IDF or the result of a Hamas bullet or misfired rocket?  Because those facts make all the difference in who’s to blame.

It’s also a battle on one side, which is being captured, where Palestinians are left with rubble and despair, so it’s no wonder that ordinary, low-information people believe the worst about Israel. Because if you have no frame of reference relating to the country, the people and their centuries-long struggle, it’s all too easy to fall for what looks like an opposite portrayal of events.

These shocking images are magnified and disseminated at the speed of lightning, wasting no time in adding numbers to sympathy searchers who are able to convince everyone that a terror group is really nothing more than freedom fighters who are doing what needs to be done in order to gain what’s rightfully theirs. 

To that effort, there is a massive communications campaign being waged in the court of public opinion, and, at the moment, it’s being led by Hamas devotees. X, formerly known as Twitter, managed, early on, to identify some of those accounts and swiftly removed hundreds of them.

But what about the ones which are still active on other social media platforms? A CBS News report stated that 51% of Gen Z’ers get their information from those outlets, which means that they are counting on what they’re hearing as representing the truth, which ultimately shapes their thinking. 

Huge influencers, for example, 44-year-old Shaun King, who promotes himself as an activist and has 5 million Instagram followers, while others enjoy the views of hundreds of thousands their posts garner on a regular basis. King, who traffics in anti-Israel rhetoric was finally ousted from Instagram when he apparently crossed a line on his account. Claiming he was “fighting for Palestine and speaking up for the human rights and dignity of Palestinians, Instagram interpreted it differently.

According to a recent Jerusalem Post report, “Around five dozen individuals, some associated with Hamas and collectively boasting more than 100 million social media followers, have been waging a propaganda campaign against Israel on various social media platforms since the start of the Swords of Iron war on October 7th.”

Another type of these propaganda warriors comes in the form of what is referred to as “independent journalists” who are embedded in the battlefield but clearly doing the bidding for Hamas, as we saw with the supposed Gazan photojournalists who were recruited to film the October 7 massacre in real-time, reporting back to their prestigious companies such as CNN, Reuters and AP.  

But, as daunting as this massive onslaught of one-sided, distorted media messaging is, Israel has no choice but to play catch-up and do their best to compete for the hearts and minds of young people as well as others who are easy prey for dishonest merchants of false indoctrination which promotes a racist narrative and has continued the antisemitic stream of thought even better than the Nazi SS ever could have.

A massive campaign needs to begin with the search for articulate and coherent communicators who can succinctly and convincingly make their case for Israel by providing factual content, crucial background and corroboration of truth from fiction.

Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesperson is just one fine example of the best vocal weapons in our arsenal of effective communicators, who no one doubts as being the real article! Many other representatives of the IDF and our government are frequently featured on such programming as Fox News, which has a wide audience of Israel supporters, but, as effective as they are, they’re, sadly, not reaching the right people.

There needs to be an ever-present force on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and other outlets, which are more frequented by the anti-Israel crowd, so that they can hear another side to the battle for truth. This especially needs to happen when we are accused of bombing a hospital or committing genocide in Gaza because when those incidents occur, Hamas influencers waste no time in getting out their own deceitful fabrications which take immediate hold of their readers and do the job of spreading hate.

One clever tactic, used by those posting anti-Israel content, has been to play the victim card as they claim persecution for putting out their opinions. The Internet is rife with such accounts, including one PBS clip that features the several bruised back of a teen and his mother who claims to have been brutalized by Israeli police when inquiring about her son’s beating. It is one such testimony which is uncorroborated. But who needs to verify its veracity when you already are inclined to believe that Israelis are the aggressors and Palestinians the victims?

So, in addition to posts, articles and spokespeople, investigative work must also be part of any effective media campaign to check out the credibility of damaging accusations that can be used against Israel and claimed as inhumane and unjustified treatment towards Palestinians. Because we are not above scrutiny and accountability. A great part of proving one’s morality depends upon their ability to mete out justice to others, deserving of it, regardless of the people to which one belongs.

It is widely believed that Israel’s military capabilities are superior to that of most countries, and that is because they have had to work hard at building the most effective and capable army of fighters in order to survive the constant deluge of conflict which is directed at us on every level. Words, photos and narratives must be included in that arsenal of weaponry used to defend our good name. We cannot waste one more minute developing the best possible ammunition that is available in order to win the war of social media.