In a Middle East Forum (MEF)/American Jewish University (AJU) October 21 podcast (video), AJU’s Jeffrey Herbst moderated a discussion about social media’s use by Islamist groups in the Middle East and the West for propaganda and radicalization, and the counterterrorist strategies employed to combat these efforts.
Guest speaker: Majd Bader, managing partner and head of strategic partnerships at Arcane International based in Tel Aviv. The following summarizes Bader’s comments:
Islamist terrorist groups today manage their message on social media because of the capacity of media platforms to influence a massive audience. Widely accessible social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn are transparent, while other platforms, such as Telegram, can be a “hidden resource” because “we can see information, [but] we don’t know the source” of the sender.
Hamas terrorists exploited social media as a tool of war by recording their atrocities in real time, live streaming video of their barbarism to their victims’ families
Social media, with its broad variety of content and platforms for both good and ill, can be manipulated by militant groups as a “secret weapon” to communicate their message, spread fear, recruit followers, or gather intelligence “about the audience, the citizens, or even about the military.” October 7 was a signal event illustrating the consequences of social media used for malign purposes. Hamas terrorists exploited social media as a tool of war by recording their atrocities in real time, live streaming video of their barbarism to their victims’ families, and instilling fear in viewers across the globe.
October 7 has also led researchers to study “the patterns of action of the terrorist organizations.” Social media content is “all done by algorithms” used by the various platforms to glean what each user is interested in seeing, then automatically feeding similar content to them. Although social media algorithms are proprietary, researchers can gain insight into their workings by studying the “statistics of that algorithm.”
Arcane International opted to work with non-Israeli neuroscientists and psychologists as researchers because of the risk that Israeli researchers’ views are susceptible to groupthink, or “conceptzia” [“concept”], in this case the mistaken belief that Hamas did not have the capability or motivation to attack. The analysis of October 7 revealed that the attack “led to the antisemitism wave” on campuses and contributed to a two hundred percent increase in Jew-hatred.
In an effort to counter propaganda on social media, the Israeli government uses “cyber units or Israeli cyber companies” to combat some of these threats. Platforms like LinkedIn also use an “algorithm [that] automatically delete[s] unprofessional content.” Conversely, there are social media algorithms specifically designed to spread propaganda. ISIS, for example, used social media to spread its message, but Facebook did a capable job of deleting the terror group’s content that was designed to instill fear in a global audience. The threat to social media requires the technology industry’s constant vigilance to stay ahead of any vulnerabilities to its defensive barriers.
Hamas’s invasion and kidnapping of Israel’s civilians mobilized the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) military campaign into Gaza. The post-October 7 demonstrations that surfaced en masse on U.S. campuses were spearheaded by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a campus student organization known for its collaboration with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign waged against Israel. SJP organized thousands of students to protest Israel’s incursion into Gaza by activating its chapters on over two hundred campuses across the U.S. and Canada. SJP’s website quickly spread the message to organize via social media and Twitter. The Twitter model, designed to generate comments in the public square, is an interactive format that widely disseminates content and reaction across social media, which then segues into “the regular media.”
Funding for student organizations such as SJP is directly or indirectly connected to the Iranian regime, either through the use of cryptocurrency or charities.
The organizers and activists behind the campus protests against Israel use a specific method to promote their message on social media by employing “content farms, or trolling farms.” This method consists of a huge number of “code writers” — mainly hired from poor countries — who flood social media with messages, photos, and content to portray Hamas as victors. Funding for student organizations such as SJP is directly or indirectly connected to the Iranian regime, either through the use of cryptocurrency or charities. The regime is “the octopus that’s trying to control everywhere and to attack everywhere.”
As the war against Iran’s proxy Hamas escalated, the IDF attacked the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing many Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force commanders. This strike led the regime to launch hundreds of missiles against Israel. The media coverage of the Islamic regime’s missile barrage on Israeli cities showed Israel as the regime’s victim. Social media images of Iran’s attack on the Jewish state influenced public opinion, which in turn affected decisions made at the political level. To wit, the White House was moved to grant “unprecedented military aid” to Israel. In this instance, Israel gained “a political and strategic benefit.”
As a general rule, to avoid traps on social media using algorithms designed to lure susceptible and vulnerable users, never provide personal information or locations on these platforms. Doing so risks a user’s sensitive information being “leaked” to malign actors for their own nefarious purposes. “We need to choose the people we connect with that … fit our aspiration[s] and fit the things that we believe in.”
Today, “maybe half of a war or conflict” takes place on social media.
