A video of a Hamas gunman firing his assault rifle at a car full of Israeli civilians has been viewed more than a million times on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, since it was uploaded on Sunday.
A photograph of dead Israeli civilians, strewn on the side of a road at an Israeli kibbutz near the Gaza Strip, has been shared more than 20,000 times on X.
And an audio recording of a young Israeli woman’s desperate cries for help as she was kidnapped from her home has been shared almost 50,000 times on the platform.
Since Hamas launched a deadly cross-border attack against Israel over the weekend, violent videos and graphic images have flooded social media. Many of the posts have been planted by Hamas to terrorize civilians and take advantage of a lack of content moderation on some social media sites, particularly X and Telegram, according to a Hamas official and social media experts interviewed by The New York Times. .
The strategy reflects the efforts of extremist groups such as the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, which took advantage of a lack of security barriers at social media companies years ago to upload graphic images to the Internet. Social media companies then reacted by deleting and banning accounts linked to those groups.
The issue arose again last week, particularly on
Israeli groups that monitor social media for hate speech and misinformation said graphic images often start on Telegram. It then moves on to X before finding its way to other social media sites.
“Twitter, or X as they are called now, has become an unethical war zone,” said Achiya Schatz, director of FakeReporter, an Israeli organization that monitors disinformation and hate speech. “In the information war that’s going on, it’s now a place where you just go and do what you want.”
In the past, his group would report fake accounts or violent content to X, which would remove the post if it violated its rules, Schatz said. Now, he added, there is no one in the company to talk to.
“Everyone we ever worked with is gone. In that company there is no one to contact,” he stated. “The information war on Twitter is over, it was lost. There is nothing left to fight against.”
It added that platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok had responded to the removal of graphic images and misinformation, although the companies were inundated with requests.
Telegram and X did not respond to a request for comment. Over the weekend, the X security team aware an update to its policies, stating that it was removing Hamas-affiliated accounts and had taken action on tens of thousands of posts.
Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, a media advocacy group, said the state of discourse on
He cited the rollback of policies against toxic content, staff cuts and the priority given to subscription accounts, which “now allows, and even begs, controversial and inflammatory content to thrive.”
Some of those subscription accounts have also been posting fake or doctored images, said Alex Goldenberg, senior intelligence analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University.
Researchers have identified images of video games that were posted on TikTok as real images. Old images from the civil war in Syria and a propaganda video from Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militant organization, have circulated like new.
“It’s a problem on social media,” Goldenberg said.
Schatz said his organization on Sunday identified a video of children in cages that had been viewed millions of times on X, amid claims that the children were Israeli hostages held by Hamas. While the origins of the video are unclear, Schatz found versions posted weeks ago on TikTok, and other researchers discovered versions of the video on YouTube and Instagram that claimed it was from Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen.
“We reported that the video was fake and definitely not a current Gaza video, but no one at X responded,” Schatz said. “The real videos are bad enough without people sharing these fake videos.”
The effect of the videos has been marked. Some Israelis have begun avoiding social media for fear of seeing their missing loved ones in graphic images.
Dr. Sol Adelsky, an American-born child psychiatrist who has lived in Israel since 2018, said many parents had been advised to keep their children away from social media apps.
“We’re really trying to limit the amount of things they see,” he said. “Schools are also providing guidance for children to quit certain social media apps.” Some US schools have also encouraged parents to tell their children to delete apps.
Dr. Adelsky added that even with the guidance, many unverified claims and scary messages had reached people through messaging apps like WhatsApp, which are popular among Israelis.
Fear and confusion are part of the strategy, according to a Hamas official who spoke only on condition of anonymity.
The official, who used to be responsible for creating content for Hamas’ social media on Twitter and other platforms, said the group wanted to establish its own narratives and seek support from its allies through social media.
When ISIS posted videos of beheadings on social media, he said, the images served as a rallying cry for extremists to join their cause and as psychological warfare against their targets. While he stopped short of saying that Hamas was following a playbook set by ISIS, he called its social media strategy successful.
