Serious Q: How Are We All Handling The Onslaught of Misinformation About Israel and Palestine?
By stacy lee kong
Image: Shutterstock
Content warning: this newsletter contains references to, and descriptions of, violence, sexual violence, torture and death.
As always, a note on language: As I have explained in previous newsletters, it’s super important that we take care with our language when discussing Israel and Palestine, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. (Since this time last year, Toronto police say there has been a 1,600% increase in Islamophobic hate crimes and a 192% increase in antisemitic hate crimes, and that antisemitism makes up 40% of all police-reported hate crimes in 2023. And the actual numbers are probably much higher, since not every hate crime is reported to police.) So to be clear, when I critique the Israeli government and military, I am not critiquing all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. I also think it’s important to push back on attempts to cast critique of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as antisemitic; it’s dangerous to conflate Zionism with Judaism, as this list of prominent Jewish writers recently argued. That’s why it’s not antisemitic to call for a permanent ceasefire—as António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, the United Nations General Assembly, 630 NGOs around the world (including Amnesty International, the Malala Fund, Medecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, Plan International, Save the Children and War Child), and the Pope are all doing. (The temporary pause that starts today is not enough.) Lastly, when I use the words colonization, genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing to describe Israel’s actions, that’s based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as academics who study genocide.
The first time I wrote about Palestine after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, I mentioned the reactions I’d been receiving for posting about this conflict, and especially for posting about Palestinian liberation, but I didn’t go into a ton of detail. I really just wanted to illustrate that, for specific subset of pro-Israel internet commenters, even the most superficial acknowledgement of Palestinians’ humanity was enough brand someone as antisemitic, even if they first acknowledged the suffering of Israeli civilians, specified that their critique was of the Israeli government, not all Jewish people and condemned Hamas. But… this week, I am going to go into more detail about the pushback I’ve received. Though it does feel a little bit weird to write about Friday Things in this way, I think it’s important to talk about how disinformation is being weaponized on social media right now, and it turns out, I have some really specific examples.
To be very clear: I’m not writing about any of this to inspire any type of action from anybody. I’m totally fine. I’m getting a fraction of the blowback that many of my friends and colleagues are getting, particularly if they’re Arab or Muslim, and I have a really great network of people who I can depend on for gut checks/support/distractions. I just think it’s important to call attention to the type of language that is being used, the reasoning behind those specific choices and especially how strategic this all is.
Specifically, there are four major themes that I’ve been seeing over and over again, both in my comment section: accusations of being antisemitic, hating Jewish people and/or wanting to see Jewish people die; accusations of ignorance; detailed descriptions of horrific atrocities, even though there is often little to no evidence that these specific incidents occurred; and the use of common trolling tactics such as brigading and astroturfing. First, I’m going to give some examples of how these tactics show up in my comment section, then I’m going to explain how they are intended to work and lastly, I’m going to fact-check them. (Also, I know I put a content warning at the top of this email, but I want to reiterate that the language in the next section is very graphic and very disturbing, and you may not want to read it. I certainly never do.)
How I’ve seen these tactics used against me
While there have been Instagram Stories claiming I “hate jews [sic] and cheer at their slaughter,” “support Hamas” and am a “terrorist sympathizer,” pro-Israel supporters have sometimes flooded my comment section with misinformation. “You don’t really care about anything other than your hatred of Jews,” said one person on a reshared Reel about how media coverage shapes our perception of this conflict. On another Reel explaining how you can use Snapchat’s map function to compare video of Israel and Gaza, that same person said, “You say you are skeptical of what any government source says, but INSTANTLY believe what Hamas had to say about the explosion—Hamas! A terrorist organization! That—yes—despite your disgusting denialism in your previous post, killed babies. Shoved knives all the way through their skulls. Does that make you feel good to think about? It must, considering your alarming commitment to fueling blood libel against Jews at every given opportunity; disseminating sickening antisemitic tropes; painting Jews as white colonizers which is both ahistoric [sic] and RACIST… but none of this matters because you are blind with hatred. It’s a sickness.”
More recently, I reposted an IG video of Noah Schnapp handing out stickers that say “Zionism is sexy” and “Hamas is ISIS.” In the caption, I explained that saying Hamas and ISIS are the same organization is inaccurate and, considering how often Palestinians civilians are conflated with Hamas militants, contributes to the dehumanization of those civilians. I quoted Monica Marks, an expert in Islamist movements who not only said those words, but also explained that linking the two groups is intended to encourage people to support Israel’s actions and “muffle criticism of [Israel’s] treatment of Palestinians,” which felt particularly pressing that day, as the death toll in Gaza had just passed 11,000. Again, I was accused of defending Hamas and hating Jewish people. One professional contact told me I was “so horribly misinformed” because “Hamas has one main objective—it is to destroy and kill all Jewish people. it is in their charter. they are terrorists. but I guess you’d defend the Nazi’s [sic], too?” Another jumped in to tell me that it was super weird for me to say “hey guys, Hamas isn’t that bad” (which I absolutely did not say) and to let me know how wrong I was to differentiate between Hamas and ISIS… even though that information was directly attributable to Marks; also, other experts have made exactly the same point.
And again, there were detailed descriptions of atrocities: From one person (this one a stranger): “This caption is just a cute way of you saying you hate all Jews and that you’re a Hamas supporter. Rape, burning babies alive in ovens, beheading, murdering entire communities, taking innocent children as hostages is not extremist enough for you?! Get a grip. Hamas is worse than isis." From another: “Defending Hamas—who brutally raped, mutilated, tortured and kidnapped civilians—by trying to minimize their actions (for the second time) is quite a take. It’s been noted!”
In addition to the implicit threats of future retribution, there are also hints that these commenters, none of whom follow Friday Things, know one another. After I replied to that first professional contact trying to explain where I was coming from, ask them not to spread misinformation (Hamas updated their charter in 2017 to state they were not seeking war with all Jewish people, only Palestine’s occupier) and request they refrain from ad hominem attacks, someone else replied that my “content has been brought to [their] attention for all the wrong reasons.” There have been people criticizing my coverage of this conflict on their Instagram stories since I started posting, so it seems reasonable to wonder if that person was encouraged to head over to Friday Things’ comment section.
Online mobilization often follows an established playbook
If that is what’s happening, there’s a name for that: brigading, a term that originated on Reddit. According to Redditor llamageddon01, it’s when “a group of users, generally outsiders to the targeted subreddit, ‘invade’ a specific subreddit and flood it with downvotes in order to damage karma dynamics on the targeted sub; spam the sub with posts and comments to further their own agenda; or perform other coordinated abusive behaviour such as insulting or harassing the subreddit’s users in order to troll, manipulate, or interfere with the targeted community.” Outside of Reddit, the term describes a coordinated effort to “comment or post repetitively and at volume to harass or silence others,” according to the Washington Post.
Another relevant term: Astroturfing. This is a similar type of behaviour, though it’s been around for longer and actually originated offline. As the Guardian explained in 2012, it’s “the attempt to create an impression of widespread grassroots support for a policy, individual, or product, where little such support exists. Multiple online identities and fake pressure groups are used to mislead the public into believing that the position of the astroturfer is the commonly held view.” (Emphasis mine.) Both of these tactics fall under the umbrella of discourse manipulation, which is when people attempt to shape a conversation in ways that are supposed to appear organic, but aren’t. In these cases, it’s being used to signal widespread support for Israel’s actions in Gaza.
I’m not being self-deprecating when I say this, but Friday Things is a relatively small platform—I have 7,000 followers on Instagram and my posts usually get a few comments, but not usually more than 10 or 12. So, if you’re wondering why anyone would bother to use these tactics in my comment section, same! But after doing more reading about how online mobilization tends to work, I think I have a better idea. Because here's the thing: according to recent polls, Americans not only overwhelmingly support an actual ceasefire, there has also been a slight decrease in sympathy for Israel among U.S. voters since Oct. 7, largely driven by young people and Democrats. In fact, another poll actually found support for Palestinians has “skyrocketed” among 18- to 34-year-olds. So from a purely communications perspective, it’s really important for Israel’s supporters to disseminate their message as effectively as possible, especially as this conflict goes on, the death toll continues to rise (though we can no longer know by how much) and the public sees more and more on-the-ground evidence of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
That means being strategic about where they concentrate their efforts and what kind of language they use. On the first point, it makes sense to target smaller accounts, especially on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, because they have a better chance of dominating the comment section, and because it gives the impression of more widespread support than they actually have. I’ve seen vitriolic pro-Israel comments on big accounts get criticized and debunked, if not totally buried by more measured comments. On the second point, I think it also makes sense to use horrific stories that any normal person would not want to think much about, and would likely feel guilty for questioning.
(Let’s pause here to note, again, that the people who are behaving this way online do not represent all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. In fact, we really cannot make any assumptions about the religion or creed of anyone who presents as a pro-Israel supporter online; according to progressive think tank Political Research Associates, which researches the political right in America, “Christian Zionists are leading the call for the U.S. to unconditionally support Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians in Jerusalem and Israel’s bombing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”)
Fact-checking my hate comments
Importantly, though, whether these horrific stories appear in my comments or on another creator’s posts or videos, they are almost never confirmed. It would be one thing if these were difficult to reckon with, but true. But in many cases, we actually can’t say with confidence that they even happened.
So, the claims:
Criticizing Israel is antisemitic. It is not antisemitic to criticize a nation’s actions; antisemitism is the act of spreading hate against Jewish people and devaluing their lives. I’ve received comments about how important it is to allow Jewish people to determine what is antisemitic and what’s not, and I agree. That’s why I think it’s important to point out that I didn’t just adopt that framework based on vibes. I looked to progressive Jewish organizations and people to guide my understanding of antisemitism, and they all agree that criticizing a government is not the same thing as discriminating against Jewish people. In fact, as Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem wrote in 2022, “leveling accusations of antisemitism against anyone who criticizes the Israeli regime—including against human rights organizations—is a manipulative assertion, that undermines the crucial global struggle against antisemitism and offends the memory of its victims throughout history.”
Criticizing Zionism is antisemitic. Based again on the perspective of Jewish organizations and people, this is not true. First of all, Zionism is not a religious belief, it’s a political ideology that emerged in the 19th century and, as Jewish Voices for Peace explains, “establish[ed] an apartheid state where Jews have more rights than others.” Second, not all Jewish people subscribe to Zionism. That’s why many Jewish organizations distinguish between Jews, Israelis and Zionists, even if they are not critical of Zionism themselves. (See: Anne Frank House’s explanation of Zionism, for example.) Even the Anti-Defamation League, which is currently, and has a history of, unfairly classifying calls for Palestinian rights as antisemitic, defines anti-Zionism as “a prejudice against the Jewish movement for self-determination and the right of the Jewish people to a homeland in the State of Israel” but asserts that “legitimate criticism of the Israeli government, its policies, or its politicians” is not anti-Israel bias, again distinguishing between the state and Jewish people as a whole. Antisemitism is about spreading hate and devaluing Jewish lives; that’s not the same thing as legitimate criticism of a nation’s political ideology, policies and actions.
It's antisemitic to classify Israel as a colonial-settler state. It would absolutely be antisemitic to say all Jewish people are colonizers, but no reasonable person is saying that. Furthermore, Israel does not represent all Jewish people. But, the country is a colonial project. There are arguments for and against classifying Israel’s creation as colonial, but there really is no credible way to deny its current status as a settler-colonial state, as Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, explained in a 2022 report.
Hamas raped girls and women. As I’ve noted before, sexual violence is an extremely common tool of war, and an extremely common topic of propaganda, which makes it very difficult to navigate this claim. There have been many eyewitness accounts of sexual violence against Israeli girls and women, and Israeli forensic teams have described examining bodies that show evidence of sexual violence, but I haven’t been able to find any independently verified evidence of the alleged mass rapes, nor has the United Nations issued an alert, as it has done for other conflicts. That’s not proof that they didn’t happen, of course; as Israeli newspaper Haaretz explained this week, actually collecting physical evidence of this violence is difficult for a variety of reasons, which contributes to the slow pace of the country’s investigation. So, my argument here is not that we deny what Israeli women say happened to them. It’s that we take care not to apply suspicion against Hamas militants to all Palestinian men, to avoid further perpetuating the Islamophobic tropes that all Muslim boys and men are monsters who are capable of sexual violence, and to resist attempts to further dehumanize Palestinians as a whole.
Hamas killed babies by beheading them, or by burning them alive in ovens. There is still no credible evidence that any babies were beheaded. According to a Washington Post The Fact Checker column published this week, “Almost two months after the Hamas attack, details are still sparse on claims of beheading of babies. One IDF official says he found a decapitated baby; a first responder says ‘little kids’ were beheaded, though an exact number was not provided. Forensic records that would document the cause of death have not been released.”
Similarly, the allegation that Hamas burned a baby alive in an oven, which stems from a speech by United Hatzalah founder and president Eli Beer on October 28 at the Republican Jewish Coalitions’ Annual Leadership Summit in Las Vegas, has not been independently confirmed. According to Israeli misinformation watchdog group FakeReporter, beyond a single eyewitness account, there are no sources that support this claim.
I’ve talked before about the purpose of stories like these ones, but to reiterate: there is no denying that Hamas militants killed civilians, including babies and children, and that each of those deaths is horrific. But when pro-Israel sources spread incendiary stories with no proof to back them up, it is imperative that we recognize what their purpose is—and it’s not to honour these lost innocent lives. It is, as always, to characterize Palestinians, and especially Palestinian men, as monsters, which helps perpetuate the lie that innocent Palestinian civilians deserve to be bombed, maimed, starved, denied water, denied medicine—eradicated.
There is no apartheid, ethnic cleansing or genocide. International human rights organizations and legal scholars have all described Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as apartheid. Genocide scholars and other experts have described what’s going on as ethnic cleansing and a genocide in progress or a potential genocide, if not a completed one. Perhaps most convincingly, members of the Israeli government and their Western allies are openly using obviously genocidal language.
What’s next
I wanted to take the time to address these claims for a specific reason: I mostly haven’t done so in the comments. Honestly, I haven’t been sure exactly how to handle misinformation and half-truths in that context—and I think that has contributed to making the comments of Friday Things IG posts sometimes feel unsafe. In general, I don’t want anyone to feel silenced and I’m trying to be sensitive to the very real fear that many Jewish people are feeling. Plus, I don’t always have the energy (or time) to engage with bad-faith arguments, which is why my response has been uneven. But that means people who might be triggered by graphic descriptions of torture and sexual violence may have come across them in my comments. What’s more, descending on my comment section is definitely an attempt to shame and scare people who believe in Palestinian liberation into staying silent. And these types of comments distract from Israel’s actions—such as indiscriminate airstrikes on civilians, refugee camps, hospitals, schools and churches. Seemingly targeted attacks on journalists. Cutting off Gaza’s water, electricity and fuel supply. Blocking humanitarian aid. Holding Palestinians—many of them women and children—in ‘administrative detention,’ sometimes without charges or trial. And so on.
So: I’m going to be much more proactive on content moderation going forward. I will be deleting comments that contain misinformation, as well as those that contain graphic descriptions of violence. I’m not trying to quash dissent, obviously. But I’ve realized that Friday Things’ Instagram is my space, and it’s okay to want it to feel safe.
Thirst Talks, Vol. 2: Timothée Chalamet Edition
I’ll be back with my favourite Thirst Experts on Dec. 12 to unpack why so many people are obsessing over Timmy C right now. (Full disclosure: He’s not really my ministry, so this is more of an academic exercise for me. But I promise it will be very funny!)
The details:
When: Tuesday, Dec. 12 at 7pm
Where: Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, 506 Bloor St. W., Toronto
How Much: $15 (But Friday Things readers can get 50% off the ticket price with the code THIRST50)
Get your tickets at HotDocs.ca!
And Did You Hear About…
Friday Things’ annual pop-culture gift guide.
This offensively luxurious wedding, which was also making the rounds on TikTok. (P.S., it looks like this is their registry 👀)
The world of ‘overemployment.’
Writer Lyvie Scott’s smart take on The Marvels, Nia DaCosta and what uneven reactions to the movie (and its boundary-breaking director) says about the future of the Marvel franchise.
The Walrus’s oral history on MuchMusic.
Bonus: This completely low-stakes friend drama. (Also: the boyfriend.) (Also, also: this is absolutely why the TL was discussing ‘invisible boundaries’ this week, I’m sorry to report.)
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