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WHETHER it is a comprehensive peace or a mere pause in the genocide to secure the release of Israeli hostages will become apparent in the coming days. What is clear is that the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and their backers have learnt a lesson about the significance of the war of narratives.
And they aren’t wasting any time, given the speed with which they are moving to capture control over the means of propagating and controlling the narrative. A cursory glance at social media platform ownership and control abundantly demonstrates this. A day into the ceasefire has already seen a massive flood of pro-Israel content on all timelines.
With the use of algorithms and AI, the course of discussions is being altered to favour one side and the visibility of the other is being severely restricted. How do those on the other side, despite their staggering numbers, counter this?
The surge in support for the just Palestinian cause and the outpouring of outrage in Western cities at the Gaza genocide have been a characteristic response to the Israeli Occupation Forces’ (IOF) two-year brutal genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip.
It’s difficult to say how any new conflict or renewed genocide will see content freely make its way to social media platforms.
Protesters have also found reprehensible the Israeli settler violence against the Palestinians, their displacement, the destruction of their infrastructure and their means of livelihood in the West Bank. These protesters have braved often ruthless police violence (as in Germany) and hundreds of arrests, as we saw in Britain, including of the infirm and elderly, for simply demonstrating with placards in support of an organisation designated ‘terrorist’, at the behest of the Labour touts of an Israeli arms manufacturer.
These street protests have shown how the genocidal Israeli apartheid state has lost the war for the moral high ground after decades of finding many a sympathetic ear for its victimhood narrative. This change in the public sentiment created a chasm between the genocide-supporting Western European governments and their people.
Perhaps for Israel, even worse was the change in mood in America where the apartheid state has always enjoyed unrivalled precedence owing in no insignificant measure to the funding of politicians — from White House incumbents to Congress members — by billionaire ‘friends of Israel’ and organisations such as the AIPAC.
In addition to the Israeli ban on foreign journalists reporting from Gaza, the legacy media itself may have covered the Gaza genocide with the necessary filters and censorship in place to offer a sanitised view of the murders of thousands of people, including some 20,000 children, following the Oct 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel in which some 800 civilians and nearly 400 security personnel were killed.
It is not clear how many fell to Hamas and how many became victims of the Hannibal Directive of the IOF whereby the authorities prefer to kill their own citizens rather than have them fall into ‘enemy’ hands and become hostages and a bargaining chip. A few segments of the Israeli media that remain independent have carried gunship pilot testimonies about this.
As social media images continued to paint a picture of the brutally disproportionate IOF response in Gaza with the number of dead or amputee children running into several thousands, public opinion started to change in the US. Several recent opinion polls support this suggestion.
A majority of young Democrats started looking at Israel negatively and supporting the occupied Palestinian cause. But even more ominously for Israel and its unshakeable pillar of support, President Donald J. Trump, the genocide created a split within the latter’s MAGA movement.
With leading MAGA figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens beginning to question the wisdom of blind US support to Israel, and its psychopathic leader Benjamin Netanyahu, the game was beginning to turn. Trump could neither ignore nor attack this influential segment of his diehard support base.
This split, along with the Trump family’s business ties with the mega rich Arab Gulf states, whose initial indifference to the Gaza genocide changed dramatically after Israel’s missile attack on Qatari soil, may have guided his hand to eventually ask Israel to pause its ruthless genocidal military campaign against Gaza’s Palestinians.
While X was already in the hands of one of Israel’s uncompromising supporters, Elon Musk, and with Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) controlled by the evil manipulator Mark Zuckerberg (whose track record of being pro-Israel and also backing right-wing causes is exactly like Musk’s), the very influential TikTok was the only social media platform that represented all user opinion regardless of who it favoured.
Brandishing the threat of shutting it down, Trump forced the Chinese owners to sell off TikTok US operations to Larry Ellison, the Oracle’s multibillionaire owner, whose son also owns/controls Paramount and, therefore, all the content on the influential CBS News in the US. Ellison is a diehard friend/funder of Israel and IOF.
With the wealth and social media empires owned by three of the richest men in the world — their collective worth surpassing a trillion and a half dollars — now firmly in the control of the genocidal Zionists’ sympathisers and supporters, it will be difficult to say how any new conflict or renewed genocide in Gaza will see content freely making its way to these platforms. Loopholes that existed earlier and afforded more openness will surely be plugged now.
Israel killed over 200 journalists in Gaza and blocked foreign media from the Strip to stop news trickling out to shape public opinion. It failed mainly because of social media images. Will this tightening of the grip via algorithms on social media change the flow of information and its impact on global public opinion? Or can the sheer numbers of users force these commercial enterprises not to censor at will?
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, October 12th, 2025
