“The first casualty of war is the truth.” The phrase
remains valid more than 100 years after US politician Hiram Warren Johnson is
purported to have said it.
اضافة اعلان
Israel’s war on Gaza is no different. In fact, as
Israel unleashed its firepower on residents of Gaza, in response to Hamas’ surprise
attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7 which, according to Israeli sources,
claimed the lives of no less than 1,300 people and left many more injured, a
war of opposing narratives also broke out.
The first 24 to 48 hours were dominated by the Israeli
version of events. The mainstream Western media adopted that version completely
as its own. Basically, the message was this: The terrorist group Hamas has carried
out a massacre against Israeli civilians, killing thousands, and Israel had the
right to self-defense.
The news reverberated across the globe. Later on,
Israeli mainstream media talked about women having been raped, victims having been
burned alive, tens of people attending a music festival having been gunned
down, and, the most atrocious of claims, that 40 babies had been beheaded. This
last claim went viral and sent the mainstream media into a frenzy.
CNN reported it, and US President Joe Biden mentioned it.
Hundreds of pro-Israel and Israeli social media activists posted the
allegation, while others retweeted it on social media platforms.
On Western news outlets, the outrageous, yet to be
corroborated, crimes of Hamas made headlines and became the focus of morning
talk shows. The Israeli narrative was dominant. There was little or no mention
of disinformation or misinformation spreading across the media.
But then the tide began to turn. Thousands of activists took
to social media platforms to sift through the Israeli claims. The most
egregious fallacy was debunked: There was no evidence of 40 Israeli babies
being beheaded. The news was reported by an Israeli journalist working for
I24News, an Israeli television network. When pressed for sources, Nicole Zedek
finally said that she had heard the claim from soldiers. The Israeli army could
not confirm the allegation even when the office of Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu repeated the claim.
As non-Western reporters investigated this and other allegations,
without being able to substantiate most, social media activists stepped in to
expose the fallacy of Zedek’s unsubstantiated reporting and called for her
dismissal. Later, and due to a massive backlash on social media, CNN and the
White House issued retractions. Other mainstream media outlets did not.
As
Israel began its indiscriminate shelling of Gaza, only a
few Arab news networks were reporting live the extent of human and physical
destruction. Western media outlets had dispatched their correspondents to
southern Israel to cover the Israeli side of the story. Almost a week would
pass without any of the major mainstream Western outlets covering the other
side.
But that was not the case on social media, especially the X
platform. Pro-Palestinian activists began posting graphic images of what was
happening in Gaza: videos, photos, and testimonies. The Israeli propaganda
machine was suddenly on the defensive. Atrocity propaganda played on both
sides. For every video posted of slain Israelis — and there were many — tens of
videos of maimed Palestinian children and bombed residential buildings were
posted in return.
The Western mainstream media still stuck to the
Israeli narrative: Israel was the victim of a terrorist attack. The Israeli propaganda
machine was hard at work to stop the deluge. It attempted to label the Oct. 7
attack as “Israel’s 9/11” and “Israel’s Pearl Harbor” in order to create an
analogy that Western audiences would adopt and sympathize with.
hashtags like “genocide, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes” spread like wildfire everywhere on social media.
But on social media platforms, the war took a different
direction. Now, facing a vast outburst of graphic images of Palestinian victims
— no Photoshop and no AI generation — the hasbara counteroffensive took a
different path. Through sympathetic mainstream media outlets, it began to
complain of misinformation and disinformation exploding on social media.
The EU warned Elon Musk’s X to remove misinformation and
grisly imagery from his platform.
A similar, milder, message was sent to Meta’s Mark
Zuckerberg, who runs Facebook and Instagram. It was never clear what kind of
content the EU was complaining about.
Misinformation works both ways. Was Musk asked to remove the
fake photos distributed by the
Israeli army of the charred body of an Israeli
baby that was later checked as fake and AI-generated? Or was it the videos of
tens of Palestinian children, some shredded to pieces, who were arriving at
Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City almost every hour?
Musk was criticized for allowing anyone to buy a blue check
verification sign, thus enabling false, and antisemitic, accounts that spread
falsehoods. That is true to some extent, but that works both ways. When
millions of people abandon biased mainstream media and head to social media
platforms, chaos is bound to take place. This is the reality of today’s world.
And while X has let the cyber combatants fight it out with
little intervention, Facebook was accused of manipulating algorithms to hide
pro-Palestinian content to the extent that users resorted to unusual posting
methods to confuse and bypass such algorithms.
But while Gaza was being pummeled and its inhabitants were
torn to pieces, hashtags like “genocide, collective punishment, ethnic
cleansing, and war crimes” spread like wildfire everywhere on social media.
Such terms associated with Israel would be sacrilegious if used by mainstream
media.
The defeat of the
Israeli narrative on most social media platforms had much to do with Israel’s actions in Gaza. Grim images of what was
happening in Gaza slowly infiltrated some Western mainstream media. Pundits
began to ask questions about the bloodbath that is taking place in Gaza and
some began to argue about Israel’s impunity and exceptionalism.
attempted to label the Oct. 7 attack as “Israel’s 9/11” and “Israel’s Pearl Harbor” in order to create an analogy that Western audiences would adopt and sympathize with.
But it was social media that managed to mobilize tens of
thousands, especially in Europe and the US, to come out and
protest at Israeli policies, but more importantly, the policies of their own governments.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European
Commission, was grilled on X for her double standards vis-a-vis Ukraine and
Gaza, and her deafening silence on the massacre of Gaza children. The
condemnation came from European citizens, who called on her to resign.
The same happened to UK Labor Party leader Sir Keir Starmer,
who appeared on TV to condone Israel’s cutting off of water, food, and electricity
to the people of Gaza as “self-defense.” He was lambasted on social media for
being complicit in war crimes.
Social media can be described as a game changer in the
propaganda war, which for decades was manipulated freely by the hasbara and the
pro-Israel mainstream media.
Arab satellite news delivers the raw picture of what is
happening in Gaza, but that is not the case for the rest of the world. Without
social media platforms, the internet in general, the rest of the world would
still be played by major Western mainstream outlets promoting the
Israeli narrative.
It is fair to say that social media has enabled millions of
pro-Palestine cyber defenders worldwide. This is what happens when social media
joins a war: The truth may be the first casualty, but not for long.
Osama Al Sharif is a journalist and political commentator based in Amman.
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