With a little help from Moscow and Beijing, Israel lost the social media battle
After October 7, dozens of volunteer and tech-backed initiatives organized to fill the vacuum left by the Israeli government. After six months of digital warring, it feels like a losing battle

In the days and hours after the blast in Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza on October 17, social media was rife with claims that Israel was responsible for it. Though it turned out not to be the case, even today, false posts about what happened there continue to appear online, claiming without a shadow of a doubt that it was the IDF that bombed the hospital.

Many in Israel consider these posts as no more than false propaganda – fake news designed to shift international public opinion on the war in the Gaza Strip. But social media researchers and activists who fight fake news see something else: Israel's total failure in its "hasbara" (public diplomacy) campaign, which has come despite an abundance of warning signs.

An analysis of these posts and of other similar ones, demonstrates that its not just popular online support boosting the false claims. Those active against the Israeli narrative are well organized. According to several social media researchers, Israeli high-tech workers who volunteered in the different influence efforts, and sources in the Israeli intelligence community, an array of forces have aligned to back the pro-Palestinian narrative.

They describe a digital distribution mechanism whose nexus is accounts operated by pro-Hamas forces, including in Gaza and Iran. But its not just that: Their content reverberates widely thanks to amplification by known mouthpieces, outlets and even influence campaigns linked to Moscow and Beijing who are interested in vilifying the United States and the administration of President Joe Biden, using Gaza as an excuse.

Among others, researches point to established influence networks that have already been exposed, such as the Chinese "Shadow Play" and the Russian "Doppelgänger" campaigns, both of which suddenly began to share content related to the war in Gaza after historically ignoring the topic and region.

Meanwhile, these two are further amplified, not always in bad faith, by pro-Palestinian and anti-Western media groups and influencers in a variety of fields, including some who belong to the antisemitic right or the progressive left in the U.S. and EU.

Anthony Goldbloom, the founder of Kaggle, which was purchased by Google, is considered a leading information scientist. Early on during the war, he sensed there was an issue online. Using his data skills, he collected information from TikTok and found that the ratio between pro-Israel and anti-Israeli videos on was 45:1.

Goldbloom told Haaretz at the end of last year that a large part of the support may be organic, as there are many more Muslims than Jews globally. However, according to his analysis, over 50 percent of the pro-Palestinian videos to which Americans were exposed at the time seemed to originate in Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

He admits that collecting data from TikTok is hard, but says that the posts he managed to collect included graphic videos, October 7 denialism, and some voicing support for Hamas and terrorism, all things that should anyway be taken offline.

Coincidentally, shortly after October 7, Goldbloom encountered TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at a social event in the United States. He says that he tried to speak to him about the issue, but was unsuccessful. At the same time, Haaretz learned that Jewish and Israeli employees in companies such as Meta, Google and others who also identified similar issues on the platforms, tried to turn to the relevant teams via internal pipelines – and failed.

As Goldbloom and other senior tech workers tried to pull strings and use connections, in Israel too efforts started being made to repel the tsunami of disinformation and incitement on social media. Private citizens who believed that the various hasbara organizations in Israel aren't sufficiently organized and weren't doing their job, began to try to fill the vacuum on their own.

Among other things, an employee at TikTok Israel turned into an informal national complaint center after his personal phone number went viral among concerned parents. He was inundated with requests – but he too was unable to wield any influence.

Not all of the initiatives were by individuals, though. Several civil society organizations, advertising firms and high-tech companies – some of them large and well known – had decided, concurrently and without coordination, to join the online monitoring efforts.

According to information obtained by Haaretz, from the start of the war until the beginning of 2024, dozens of such independent "hasbara war rooms" were set up in an attempt to fight everything from disinformation to misinformation, to antisemitism and incitement, and also to create pro-Israeli content.

But soon, these spontaneous efforts hit a wall, exposing a problem Israeli social media researchers had feared for years: Israel and the Israeli public hadn't prepared to repel an information assault of such magnitude.

Volunteers, even those aided by technology, were unable to properly find content or flag it.

Many resources were wasted on misplaced moderation attempts. For example, content considered insulting or problematic by those reporting was flagged, despite the fact that it didn't violate the rules of the social media platforms, and therefore in the end wasn't removed. Generally, drawing the distinction between content that is illegal, like posts that incite to violence, as opposed to content that is upsetting to Israelis, is tough – and doing so at scale is nearly impossible.

Ari Ben Ami, a social media researcher and the owner of Telemetry, a company that monitors influence activity on Telegram, talks of another issue in social media monitoring. Like other researchers in the field, Ben Ami notes that nowadays, popular social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram focus on video clips – whereas the technological tools developed in the past were built for text.

More importantly, all activists encountered a problem familiar to social media researchers: the inability to gather information from social media platforms, for example from closed groups or private profiles. Social media platforms, for their part, block access to their data both for their users' privacy and for financial reasons.

In order to overcome this problem, the activists used Israeli companies such as Bright Data, which specializes in gathering information from open online sources, and were joined by sophisticated civilian initiatives such as Iron Truth and Digital Dome, which not only develop tools to find problematic content, but also created a monitoring pipeline to make sure that content that should be removed, actually is.

These enabled the volunteers to find and report posts more easily and efficiently.

Moderation was also made possible thanks to the Israeli company ActiveFence, which help social media platforms monitor posts that were reported as harmful or inciting, and to classify them accordingly.

In the case of Digital Dome, a technological initiative that included a team of volunteers, over 110,000 problematic posts were successfully reported over a period of six months – about a quarter of which were removed by the social media platforms themselves. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even TikTok are in contact with the Israeli Justice Ministry, which notifies them of content classified as inciting according to Israeli law.

However, the volunteers are still finding it difficult to work with Telegram.

Nevertheless, a summary report by Digital Dome obtained by Haaretz asserts that activists who worked closely with the company managed to cause the removal of 24 Telegram channels. The organization also boasts of restricting so-called "super spreaders" of anti-Israel information, taking credit for putting an end to live meetings on X (formerly Twitter) moderated by an official Hamas spokesman, and the restriction of videos by organizations such as Eye on Palestine.

Another success is related to the Israel firm XPOS, which also managed to bring about the removal of Telegram channels that spread false and inciting content, through the Justice Ministry.

According to Maya Zehavi, one of the leaders of Digital Dome, it seems that social media platforms had little motivation to enforce their own guidelines concerning inciting or racist content. "It doesn't seem that there was really any urgency there, as we see in other areas such as pornography and drug dealing," she says.

Recently, disinformation watchdog Fake Reporter published an investigation that exposed an Arab-language influence network called Isnad, Arabic for "support" or "reinforcement."

Operated by volunteers, the network provides ready-made databases that contain anti-Israeli materials. It includes Telegram groups in which users receive daily tasks, including the dissemination of anti-Israel content and "reliable" interaction, according to the operators, of fake profiles with Israeli users, to help give the operation credibility. Their declared purpose: "to dismantle the Israeli public's support for the war, to damage the image of Israeli victory and to emphasize Gaza's steadfastness and Palestinian resistance."

According to Ben Ami, other such networks exist and operate from several countries around the world. Other researchers who found similar campaigns, describe how most of them start out on Telegram and from there move to other social media platforms.

Ben Ami says that so far he has been able to identify almost 300 users and channels that work for the benefit of Hamas and are indirectly linked to Iran and groups of hackers working on its behalf. However, attempts to block these channels were only partially successful. Most of the time, Telegram blocks access from Israel to groups connected to Hamas – instead of removing them.

Researchers and other activists say that the true power of these influence networks is not their own. In fact, Hamas and Iran, intelligence analyst say, do not have a proper influence infrastructure in the West. The success of many of these anti-Israeli efforts stems from the fact that they receive the support of Beijing and Moscow and their online proxies.

"Hamas doesn't really have a significant influence apparatus, and what they do have is mainly support from Iran," says Ben Ami. "Most of their influence is directed to the Arab world. They don't have infrastructure in the West, but China and Russia do have it. And we see how they are disproportionately focused on the war in Gaza, and how they're united on this subject in an almost unprecedented manner."

"It's not only nonorganic activity, it's not only fake accounts," adds Zehavi. "If anything, what's disturbing here is that there's money from China, Russia or Qatar, which actually fund initiatives or influencers that are super spreaders – and that is entirely organic."

Whatever the case, almost seven months into the war, it seems that most of the pro-Israeli volunteer organizations and tech initiatives have all but evaporated or merged. Most of them have understood that the tools at their disposal are very limited. Monitoring social media is an expensive business, and it's hard to operate it without an ongoing financial investment.

But above all, it seems that the activists understood that they're fighting tremendous forces. "We're alone, as Israelis – and certainly as volunteers – we can no longer stop this," says one activist. "It's impossible to argue any more; it's simply not a level playing field."

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TikTok said in response: "In the first six months of the war we removed over 3.1 million video clips and stopped over 140,000 live broadcasts in the area of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, due to violations of the rules of our community. These included content that promoted Hamas, hateful speech, violent extremism and misleading information. During the same period, we removed tens of millions of posts and over 320 million fake accounts all over the world."

"In addition, we mobilized resources to help us to improve our proactive automatic identification and we reinforced our content-checking teams. We clarified our policy, conducted additional training sessions for content checkers, opened a designated war room for the war, and cooperated regularly with legal authorities all over the world."

Israel's National Public Diplomacy Directorate: "From the first hours of the outbreak of the war the National Public Diplomacy Directorate in the Prime Minister's Office has been waging war on an unprecedented scale in the global public diplomacy arena, in order to create legitimacy for Israel's policy and for its actions on the battlefield. The [directorate's] activity embodies a multi-systemic, integrated and adapted effort for engaging in hasbara and public diplomacy, installations and productions, spokesmanship, communications and advertising activity, based on the national hasbara policy that is decided on a daily basis in the special war room that was opened in the Kirya Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv. It's important to point out in particular the 'HamasMassacre' website, which was launched in cooperation with the IDF Spokesperson in order to fight denial of the October 7 massacre."