How overmatched is Israel when it comes to social media – very especially the omnipresent, Chinese owned and operated, tik tok site?
From Jeffrey Sonnenberg’s truly unsettling article at U.S. News, via msn.com:
Today, the images and videos circulating, especially across social media, are offering a very poor representation of the truth of what happened on Oct. 7 in Israel. This is partly due to the Israeli government’s understandable efforts to protect the privacy and dignity of the victims, and abstaining from publishing evidence of the atrocities committed to the public. At the same time, the content that is flooding social platforms now reveals that something is fundamentally broken in how millions of people around the world are consuming information about the events of the Hamas Massacre and the subsequent Israel-Hamas War. Rightly, there is ample heart-wrenching footage from Gaza across social media platforms amidst significant civilian casualties; but there is also sadly rampant misinformation fomenting anger, and extremist antisemitic and Islamophobic hate alike, on those platforms.
The problem appears particularly prevalent on TikTok, whose short-video format is not wholly conducive to providing accurate, verifiable context. The fact that pro-Palestinian hashtags on TikTok have more reach than 10 top mainstream news sites from across the political spectrum combined, according to research conducted by data scientist Anthony Goldbloom, may not sound particularly disturbing on its own. And likewise with the fact there are 54 views of videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags for every view of a TikTok video with a pro-Israel hashtag in the U.S. or that #freepalestine is one of the top-performing hashtags across all of TikTok.
But what is disturbing is that even a cursory scroll through these TikTok videos and “Photo Mode” on a random search reveals what many argue is rampant atrocity-denying antisemitic content. Some of those many examples can be seen in this catalogue by Jonathan Greenblatt’s Anti-Defamation League, with some posts blatantly denying any atrocities occurred or peddling antisemitic tropes. These posts are still pervasive even though TikTok claims that they have beefed up their content moderation team, removing millions of videos promoting Hamas, hate speech, terrorism, and misinformation. Unfortunately, their content moderators may still be outgunned with even TikTok acknowledging that they have “seen spikes in fake engagement” as well as a “rise in content promoting terrorism” in unprecedented scale and scope.
How does Israel, or any website that tries to present Israel’s side of things, compete against that?
And how perverse is it that tik tok is one of the most relied-upon sources young people have for “information”?
Is the influence of tik-tok why so many young people, obviously including college/university students who you would hope (incorrectly) know better, march in the streets waving “Free Palestine” banners?
Is it why, based on the chants that omnipresent inciters with megaphones cue these young people to scream out like trained robots, they are so obviously ignorant of what Palestine is, who “Palestinians” actually are (hint: there was no such thing as a specifically Arab group calling themselves “The Palestinians” until yasir arafat invented it in the mid-1960’s) and how the Israel/non-Israel land distribution of Palestine actually came to be?
I am not certain of what Israel should – or even can – do to get a fair shake here. Nor am I certain that our mainstream media, in its current condition, is capable of helping that fair shake to happen…or even if a good many of our mainstream media want to do so.
I hope the powers that be in Israel have a some serious ideas about dealing with this that I haven’t come up with. Because I shudder to think what might happen if they don’t.
