https://arab.news/2tmhe
Away from the real world and the killing fields of Gaza, another war rages between pro-Palestine activists on the one hand and Israel’s high-tech military, supported by IT giants primarily from the US, on the other. This conflict is taking place mainly on social media platforms across the digital sphere in a bid to sway global public opinion. The good news is that Israel is losing the war of algorithms.
Immediately after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, Israel’s propaganda machine kicked in to distort, exaggerate, and lie about the scale of the atrocities that took place on that day. The objective was to mobilize public opinion through mainstream Western media, by feeding them enough horror stories to justify Israel’s whole-scale retaliation against the people of Gaza under the banner of “Israel’s right to self-defense.”
Israel imposed a total shutdown of all news coming out of Gaza. It barred, as it continues to do today, all international media from entering the besieged enclave. The only version or narrative of what was taking place there was primarily through the well-established Israeli propaganda machine, the hasbara.
But while the Western mainstream media had no qualms about its reporters being barred from entering Gaza to carry out independent coverage of the war, they were happy to repeat and promote the Israeli narrative without verification. The only other source was and remains the tens of Palestinian journalists, native residents of Gaza, who were associated with Arab TV networks and many key Western news agencies and TV stations.
