Misinformation, censorship and propaganda: The information war on Gaza

Since 7 October, both sides of the Israel-Hamas war have sought to influence public opinion. A dense fog of war, unprecedented in both scale and intensity, has descended. The deliberate dissemination of false or inaccurate information (disinformation) and the unintentional sharing of inaccurate or misleading information (misinformation) in Gaza on social media platforms have become commonplace, leaving people to grapple with a disorientating barrage of lies and propaganda.

This information war has numerous components, including the dissemination of false narratives, the removal of content from its original context, and the widespread use of fake accounts. For example, on the morning of 7 October, as Hamas’ attack on Israel began to unfold, employees of Tel Aviv-based Cyabra turned their attention to a parallel assault on social media. What they discovered was a “highly organized influence operation” featuring thousands of fake accounts. Rather than act as a mere sideshow to Hamas’ military operation, the parallel assault provided a foretaste of the barrage of propaganda and disinformation to come.

During the first two days (7 and 8 October), Cyabra’s analysis of two million Gaza-related posts across social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X (formerly known as Twitter) alleged that one in four profiles were fake. Of the 162,000 profiles analyzed, around 40,000 were bogus pro-Hamas accounts, claimed Rafi Mendelsohn, Cyabra’s vice president of marketing. The social threat intelligence company’s analysis, which uses semi-supervised machine learning to look at between 600 and 800 behavioral parameters, was based on conversations around keywords such as Israel, Hamas, Gaza, and Palestine. Many of these accounts had been largely inactive for a year or more, before being activated on 7 October.