War's New Front is Social Media
As Israel attacks on the offensive, Israeli citizens discuss the impact of the horrifying videos that have been released onto social media platforms, pushing a seemingly new front in warfare.
In Israel, waking up to sirens is sadly not an abnormal occurrence. However, watching fellow civilians be murdered online is a level of psychological manipulation and terror that is akin to the ISIS beheading of western hostages in 2014. Hamas leveraged social media platforms like Telegram, X, and Tik Tok to send a chilling message to the masses. In today's post-modern world, the widespread visibility of war and the release of violent footage, casts an even wider net of victims in Hamas' recent attacks.
At 6:30AM on Saturday, October 7th, Israeli citizens woke up to the sounds of sirens permeating through their homes. Disgruntled residents walked into the hallway of their apartment buildings to wait out the alarm. Israeli infrastructure does not account for bomb shelters in every apartment unit across the country. For older buildings, sheltering in the hallway is the safest place.
Soon after, notifications on Ynet, an Israeli news outlet, began flooding the phones of many Israelis. Alerts notifying the infiltration at the Gaza border bombarded the phone of Or Yehoshua, a nanny, tattoo artist, and now army reserve soldier. What was thought as a routine rocket threat, quickly became a much larger conflict, one that is unprecedented in Israeli history.
While traditional media broadcasted the events of the gruesome attack, social media held the most horrifying of details. Endless videos erupted in social media platforms. Yehoshua recounts the devastating content that many were unable to ignore:
“You go into social media and the videos won't stop. It's like no matter how much you scroll, they just won't stop. And it's so heartbreaking.”
Yehoshua goes on, “you feel like you need to watch those things because you're here and you live here and this thing is happening right now and you need to know what's going on. You need to have some kind of a control over the situation. So the best you can do is just watch all those terrifying, terrible, terrifying videos. It's really- it makes you more stressed and it makes you more anxious and it makes you- you can't watch those things and not cry.”
The desire to consume as much information created hysteria and caused unimaginable harm to the Israeli public. In the first hours of the conflict, unregulated videos on the platform X surfaced by Hamas and their military wing, Qassam Brigades. After Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, the company changed the verification status of user accounts. Now, a person can pay an eight dollar monthly subscription to attain a blue checkmark. Using the platform X, Hamas posted full, unblurred images and videos from verified accounts. Footage of murdered Israelis, the destruction of Israeli tanks, and bodycam footage of the storming Israeli military bases, are just some of the content that was proliferated online from Hamas terrorists themselves.
The historic use of violent videos as a leveraging tool for terrorist recruitment is highlighted by Yasmine Green
, CEO of Jigsaw, a Google-owned organization that designs tech to flag content from terrorists groups.
She told NBC reporter, “we’re about to witness a phenomenal wave of radicalization, the incitement to violence is really concerning. I won’t be surprised when I see it in the Hamas case, because I already learned the lesson from the ISIS case that egregious violence can be a recruitment asset for terrorist groups.”
Perhaps one of the most disturbing videos that is circulating online is of Noa Argamani, a participant at the Nova festival in southern Israel who is seen being taken by Hamas terrorists on the back of a motorbike. A heartbreaking testimony by Argamani’s father shows him gripping the reporter’s wrist in anguish as he desperately yearns for his daughter’s safe return.
In response to the gruesome videos posted online, family and friends have also taken to social media. The Instagram account, save_noa_and_avinatan, posts daily content to raise awareness and exposure about the abduction of Noa and her boyfriend, Avinatan. Another Instagram account, run by an Israeli nonprofit in conjunction with US college students, survived.to.tell, shares first person accounts of the massacres both at the Nova festival and at the kibbutzim’s in the surrounding area. Primary source survivors post Instagram reels explaining their treacherous survival.
The social media war that is being waged now garners mass virtual participation from civilians from both sides of the conflict. Counter protests on Israel have already erupted both in cities and online. However, the content that the Israeli people have consumed following the first few hours of the attack is footage that one cannot unsee. The collective trauma, pain, and anger is felt deeply by every person I interviewed. For Israeli’s, the fear is no longer an air strike, but a terrorist infiltration inside their own homes.