11 December 2023. In a recent essay (in German), Götz Hamann, Reporter Technology and Digital Society at ZEIT ONLINE and a regular participant in the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium, investigates “information pollution” and images as a tactic of war.
In it, he describes, among other things, how the Israeli company Cyabra from Tel Aviv searched the major networks TikTok, Instagram, Telegram and X for posts about the massacre in the first 48 hours after the Hamas murders. One result: “A quarter of the posts came from fake users. And the speed with which manipulated videos were circulated, their quality, the sheer number and also the number of slightly different versions point to state actors. No one else has such possibilities.”
According to Hamann, the goals of the state actors were almost identical: “to discredit the West for its policies in the Middle East, but at the same time to incite as many Muslims as possible and thus the large immigrant communities in Europe and the US against those governments that support Israel. The campaigns reinforced the Hamas narrative: it tried to turn terrorists into freedom fighters and brutal kidnappers into caring caregivers. In this way, the propaganda obscenely twisted an already horrific reality and used it for its own purposes. According to Cyabra, these campaigns reached up to 500 million people in the first 48 hours after the murders. Many of them took up the theme. The propaganda fell on fertile ground.”
The anti-Semitic demonstrations worldwide, combined with the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” calling for the destruction of Israel, are sad proof of this.
