PROPAGANDA & MISINFORMATION AS WEAPONS OF WAR

Propaganda and misinformation have long been used as weapons of war, exploited to demoralize enemy morale and to wear down the will of an enemy nation to fight. By manipulating the news, military successes on the side of the propagandist can be exaggerated or even invented. The moral superiority of the cause against which the enemy is fighting can be falsified and lies and demonization of the enemy’s leaders can be spread to disintegrate resistance by producing evidence that the mass of the enemy people have been deceived and misled. Throughout history, such tactics have been commonplace, with the Nazis even appointing Joseph Goebbels as their Second World War Propaganda Minister. But today’s Israeli Palestinian conflict in Gaza has revealed a new and sinister escalation of the concept.

The combination of social media, particularly X (formerly Twitter) and AI (artificial intelligence) has opened up a new battle front, that has seen a surge in misinformation and disinformation, as supporters on either side aim to harvest patronage and vilify their adversaries. The Israelis were quick to seize the propaganda initiative following the brutal Hamas incursion into Israel on October 7th, when 1,400 men, women, children and even babies were murdered. Israeli political leaders dubbed the terrorist attack as “Israel’s 9/11”. President Joe Biden, describing the attack as the “deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust,” on his visit to Tel Aviv on 19^th October, claimed that Jewish leaders had shown him images of children beheaded by Hamas. His statement was widely circulated by the international media and by Israel. However, the White House later had to retract the claim, stating that neither the president nor US officials had in fact independently confirmed or seen such images or reports.

On the Palestinian side, within minutes of the horrific bombing of the al-Ahli hospital in the Gaza Strip on October 17, Hamas blamed Israel and claimed the missile attack had killed at least 500 people. They said it was clear evidence of the Israeli military’s indiscriminate terror tactics. Their allegations were widely disseminated by the international news channels and again caused a surge of outrage on X and other social media platforms. The BBC were one of the first to take a more cautionary approach to the news, using experts to analyse Hamas images of the crater and damage to surrounding buildings and concluding that the alleged missile was far smaller than any ever used by the Israelis and was almost certainly one fired locally by Palestinian militants. It soon emerged that indeed the explosion had been caused by a rocket mis-fired by Islamic Jihad terrorists who also operate in the Gaza Strip, and the death toll had been nearer several dozen, rather than 500. Although a horrifying tragedy, the al-Ahli issue was a blatant example of misinformation that inflamed public opinion worldwide.

Misleading videos, translation errors and outright false claims have become a key feature of the Gaza conflict, giving a new meaning to the saying ‘the Fog of War’. Truth has been one of the main casualties. Fake news, suspicious, malicious and graphic content, have been spread far and wide, often obscuring the real unfolding tragedy in Gaza. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs claims that “Hamas uses the media and social networks as a tool to spread false propaganda and incitement to hide war crimes and the crimes against humanity committed by Hamas terrorists.” On the Palestinian side, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, has accused Israel of “committing barbaric massacres against unarmed civilians” to conceal its own “defeats”.

One of the main conduits for viral misinformation has been X (formerly Twitter). Musk’s changes to the platform, reducing the already severely understaffed trust and safety team, including the disbanding of the Trust and Safety Council, has facilitated an outpouring of false information. This has had the potential to influence public opinion, create confusion, hatred and fear, and even shape government policies, undermining democracy. On the pro-Palestinian side, there has been endless focus on the killing of civilians in Gaza, with limited mention of the 7^th October atrocities, or reference to the fact that Hamas has ruthlessly positioned its underground command centres beneath hospitals, schools and nurseries and its missile sites in heavily populated urban centres, using innocent Palestinians as human shields.

A widely circulated video on social media, claiming to show a major victory for Hamas, depicted an Israeli tank being hit in an airstrike. It turned out the footage was computer-generated and was extracted from a trailer for the video game “Squad,” released in December 2022. Another video that went viral, supposedly portraying an Israeli air assault, was found to have been extracted from popular video games such as Arma 3. Even the BBC had to deny a report that circulated on social media, claiming that they had carried a news story declaring that weapons provided to Ukraine by NATO had been sold to Hamas. It was a fake story. Unfortunately, even when it has been made totally clear that a post on social media is fake, it is often not taken down and continues to spread. As we have witnessed in Britain, with the mass demonstrations in London, Edinburgh and other cities, throngs of worldwide supporters for either the Palestinian cause or for Israel, flock to the streets, often goaded and inflamed by what they have seen on social media.

Experts now say the sheer volume of information and constant propaganda and counterpropaganda, have made it nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction. The intensity of the Israel-Hamas war clearly requires an exhausting amount of fact-checking, contextualisation, and scepticism by the public and politicians. We need to be extra-cautious about trusting information circulating on social media. When we come across online information, we should try to verify the distributor’s credibility and official status. We should check for evidence from reliable channels, like reputable newspapers and media outlets such as the BBC. If information is attributed to a source, look it up to confirm if they indeed did publish it. Separating fact from fiction during a raging conflict like Gaza is never going to be easy, but it is essential if we wish the truth to prevail.