The Daily Populous Monday November 6th, 2023 morning edition
Authored by nytimes.com and submitted by RufusTheFirefly

The conflict between Israel and Hamas is fast becoming a world war online.

Iran, Russia and, to a lesser degree, China have used state media and the world’s major social networking platforms to support Hamas and undercut Israel, while denigrating Israel’s principal ally, the United States.

Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq have also joined the fight online, along with extremist groups, like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, that were previously at odds with Hamas.

The deluge of online propaganda and disinformation is larger than anything seen before, according to government officials and independent researchers — a reflection of the world’s geopolitical division.

“It is being seen by millions, hundreds of millions of people around the world,” said Rafi Mendelsohn, vice president at Cyabra, a social media intelligence company in Tel Aviv, “and it’s impacting the war in a way that is probably just as effective as any other tactic on the ground.” Cyabra has documented at least 40,000 bots or inauthentic accounts online since Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7.

The content — visceral, emotionally charged, politically slanted and often false — has stoked anger and even violence far beyond Gaza, raising fears that it could inflame a wider conflict. Iran, though it has denied any involvement in the attack by Hamas, has threatened as much, with its foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, warning of retaliation on “multiple fronts” if Israeli forces persisted in Gaza.

“It’s just like everyone is involved,” said Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The institute, a nonprofit research organization in London, last week detailed influence campaigns by Iran, Russia and China.

The campaigns do not appear to be coordinated, American and other government officials and experts said, though they did not rule out cooperation.

While Iran, Russia and China each have different motivations in backing Hamas over Israel, they have pushed the same themes since the war began. They are not simply providing moral support, the officials and experts said, but also mounting overt and covert information campaigns to amplify one another and expand the global reach of their views across multiple platforms in multiple languages.

The Spanish arm of RT, the global Russian television network, for example, recently reposted a statement by the Iranian president calling the explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza on Oct. 17 an Israeli war crime, even though Western intelligence agencies and independent analysts have since said a missile misfired from Gaza was a more likely cause of the blast.

Another Russian overseas news outlet, Sputnik India, quoted a “military expert” saying, without evidence, that the United States provided the bomb that destroyed the hospital. Posts like these have garnered tens of thousands of views.

“We’re in an undeclared information war with authoritarian countries,” James P. Rubin, the head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, said in a recent interview.

From the first hours of its attack, Hamas has employed a broad, sophisticated media strategy, inspired by groups like the Islamic State. Its operatives spread graphic imagery through bot accounts originating in places like Pakistan, sidestepping bans of Hamas on Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter, according to Cyabra’s researchers.

A profile on X that bore the characteristics of an inauthentic account — @RebelTaha — posted 616 times in the first two days of the conflict, though it had previously featured content mostly about cricket, they said. One post featured a cartoon claiming a double standard in how Palestinian resistance toward Israel was cast as terrorism while Ukraine’s fight against Russia was self-defense.

Officials and experts who track disinformation and extremism have been struck by how quickly and extensively Hamas’s message has spread online. That feat was almost certainly fueled by the emotional intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian issue and by the graphic images of the violence, captured virtually in real time with cameras carried by Hamas gunmen. It was also boosted by extensive networks of bots and, soon afterward, official accounts belonging to governments and state media in Iran, Russia and China — amplified by social media platforms.

ale_93113 on November 5th, 2023 at 15:45 UTC »

Iran is definitely pro hamas

Russia is a bit pro hamas for geopolitical reasons

But trying to lump china with these two is disingenuous, their criticism of Israel and support for the Palestinians even if it means tolerating hamas is hardly anything different than the one said by Colombia, Chile or Spain, all Western countries

Brightfox42069 on November 5th, 2023 at 14:17 UTC »

I suspect that there is a good chance that within our lifetimes, we will see segregation of access to the internet to global blocs. It will not be a popular move and sets a dangerous precedent, but then again, China and its ilk have already set that precedent through their own firewalls and massive online propaganda and disinformation campaigns. What irony that the internet age is, so far, dismantling the hopeful globalism of the 90s.

At a bare minimum, we are going to see governments force social media to add new methods of scrutiny when making new accounts.

RufusTheFirefly on November 5th, 2023 at 13:12 UTC »

SS: According to this New York Times report, the massive use of online disinformation and manipulation of social media in democratic countries by China, Russia and Iran during this past month to "undercut Israel and denigrate Israel's principal ally, the United States" is completely without precedent.

Obviously we are always hearing about social media manipulation, we know it is a geopolitical fact and have come to expect it. But I posted this article because the numbers (which I quoted in bold below) blow away everything that has come before. This is by far the largest disinformation/manipulation campaign waged to date. This may be the first taste of what manipulation campaigns look like in the post chat-gpt era.

Key Quotes

-The deluge of online propaganda and disinformation is larger than anything seen before, according to government officials and independent researchers

-While Iran, Russia and China each have different motivations in backing Hamas over Israel, they have pushed the same themes since the war began.

-In a single day after the conflict began, roughly one in four accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X posting about the conflict appeared to be fake, Cyabra found. In the 24 hours after the blast at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, more than one in three accounts posting about it on X were.

-The company’s researchers identified six coordinated campaigns on a scale so large, they said, that it suggested the involvement of nations or large nonstate actors.