by ZARRAR KHUHRO
On Oct 6, 2023, you could not have imagined a world in which Israel was as widely hated as it is today; its very name is now a byword for genocide, systematic rape, atrocity and infanticide. In video after video, we have seen not only the depredations and war crimes of Israeli forces, but also the joy and pride on the faces of the genocidaire soldiers and the generals and government officials who direct their actions. For the vast majority of us, these images cannot be viewed with anything other than revulsion and disgust; it’s the most human of instincts to feel sympathy for Israel’s victims and rage against the unrepentant perpetrators.
But when Israel and its supporters look out at this new world, they don’t see that all this fury is caused by their actions; instead, they blame ‘antisemitism’, a tropey accusation that has long since lost its sting, and they point to social media — and in particular TikTok — for spreading anti-Israel sentiments. It’s not the atrocities that make us so hated, they believe, it’s the algorithms. And so, the thinking goes, if we can bully, buy or otherwise control social media platforms the way we control the bulk of mainstream Western media, anti-Israel sentiment could be managed. If we scrub the digital archives of our genocide, then it will be forgotten. And this is exactly what they’re doing.
First, they came for TikTok, and with good reason; Northeastern University conducted a study on pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli messaging on TikTok in the immediate aftermath of Oct 7. They found that there were 170,430 pro-Palestinian posts while pro-Israel posts numbered 8,843. But as we all should know, it’s not just about volume but about engagement too, and here we see that there were 236 million views for pro-Palestinian posts and a comparatively measly 14m for pro-Israel posts.
And in the following two years, the trend has not reversed but has in fact become progressively more and more pro-Palestinian. In fact, while pro-Israel posts and views spiked immediately after Oct 7, as a reaction to the event and then started to decline (as is typical of posts related to a major development), the pro-Palestinian posts are increasing in the pattern one ascribes to a sustained and broad-based movement.
Netanyahu is already celebrating.
Zionists identified this issue early on with Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of America’s Anti-Defamation League saying in a leaked audio “we have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem”, which needed to be solved. In typical Zionist fashion, they did so by manipulating the levers of US politics and throwing money at the problem. Suddenly a campaign started in the US accusing the Chinese government of manipulating TikTok’s algorithm and of accessing the private data of American users and demanding that TikTok’s American operations be sold off. It was a transparent ploy, because the real reason TikTok is being targeted has nothing to do with China and everything to do with Israel and its image.
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