Israel Attack: Know How Social Media Was Used in this War

Israel suffered a massive attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas on the morning of 7th October. This attack by the Hamas group was unprecedented in Israel killing hundreds of civilians residing near the Gaza Strip and captivating a number of hostages.

As soon as the air strike occurred social media platforms got flooded by the news. Even both the parties engaged in the war turned their ways to social media platforms to start an information warfare.

What is the warfare running on social media?

Israel's official social media account openly stated that " We are at war". One of the Israeli officials also compared Hamas to ISIS in one of the videos posted on Instagram.

As there were a number of posts being made by some unofficial as well as official accounts verified under the X platform, X banned these Hamas-affiliated accounts.

The militant group then turned their way to the messaging platform Telegram to distribute their content, with a sudden surge of followers on these channels. Hamas has been promoting videos as well as on-ground footage from these channels and others following them have reposted these videos to other social media platforms, according to NBC News.

"Hamas asks its audiences—fellow Palestinians, the broader Arab and Muslim communities, and the world in general—to witness Israeli aggression and the suffering of the Palestinian people and to condemn Israel and support Hamas accordingly. Hamas’s websites and postings are in Arabic, English, French, and Hebrew, though Arabic is the dominant language given Hamas’s focus on communicating to its immediate constituents in Gaza and efforts to appeal to supporters in the West Bank. Thus, while Hamas uses a broad array of technologies to convey similar messages across different audiences, its primary audience remains its constituents". wrote CSIS (Center for Strategic & internal Studies) in its blog titled 'Understanding Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s Uses of Information Technology'.

" Nevertheless, few social media platforms and corporations, TikTok being one of the less tightly regulated ones, have implemented bans on accounts associated with radical affiliations and political figures," said  Thomas George, President, of CyberMedia Research (CMR) while speaking to Dataquest.

He further added," In fact, the radical outfits do have guidelines for their members on what to post and how to play the self-pity cards like all the radicals killed in counter-attacks are to be called civilians, etc."

Here we even got to see how Israel came up with a YouTube Ad making bold statements against the Hamas group. The advertisement ran on YouTube stated "Hamas declared war against Israel. Armed Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel via a ground invasion and started going door to door slaughtering innocent Israelis. Hundreds of Israeli civilians including children and women have been killed and injured and Israeli hostages have been taken. This is a war and Israel will take every measure necessary to protect our citizens against the barbaric terrorists".

Conclusion

After the Israel attack, it became evident that social exposure on social media platforms is constantly evolving. These terrorist groups have much more power in hand to utilize technology in operational and creative ways to start information warfare against their rivals. In order to deal with such crises governments, and companies owning social media platforms need to identify how these groups are using IT products to make aggressive moves and put a limit on these accounts.