In the coming days it will become clear WHETHER this is a comprehensive peace or a simple pause in the genocide to ensure the release of the Israeli hostages. What is clear is that the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and their supporters have learned a lesson about the importance of narrative warfare.
And they are not wasting any time, given the speed with which they are moving to capture control over the means of propagation and control of the narrative. A quick look at the ownership and control of social media platforms abundantly demonstrates this. One day after the ceasefire has already seen a massive avalanche of pro-Israel content across all timelines.
With the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence, the course of discussions is being altered to favor one side and the visibility of the other is being severely restricted. How do those on the other side counter this, despite their staggering numbers?
Rising support for the just Palestinian cause and widespread outrage in Western cities over the Gaza genocide have been a characteristic response to the Israeli Occupation Forces’ (IOF) brutal two-year genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip.
It is difficult to say how any new conflict or renewed genocide will cause content to freely reach social media platforms.
Protesters have also found Israeli settler violence against Palestinians, their displacement, the destruction of their infrastructure and their livelihoods in the West Bank reprehensible. These protesters have defied often ruthless police violence (as in Germany) and hundreds of arrests, as we saw in Britain, including of the sick and elderly, for simply demonstrating with banners in support of an organization branded “terrorist”, at the behest of Labor resellers of an Israeli arms manufacturer.
These street protests have demonstrated how the genocidal Israeli apartheid state has lost the war for the moral high ground after decades of finding many sympathetic ears for its victimhood narrative. This change in public sentiment created a chasm between Western European governments that supported the genocide and their people.
Perhaps even worse for Israel was the change of mood in the United States, where the apartheid state has always enjoyed unrivaled precedence due in no small measure to the funding of politicians – from White House incumbents to members of Congress – by billionaire ‘friends of Israel’ and organizations such as 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 filters and censorship necessary to provide a clean view of the killings of thousands of people, including some 20,000 children, following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, in which some 800 civilians and nearly 400 security personnel were killed.
It is unclear how many fell into the hands of Hamas and how many became victims of the IOF’s Hannibal Directive according to which the authorities prefer to kill their own citizens rather than let them fall into “enemy” hands and become hostages and bargaining chips. A few segments of the Israeli media that remain independent have published testimonies from artillery pilots in this regard.
As social media images continued to paint a picture of the IOF’s brutally disproportionate response in Gaza, with several thousand children killed or amputated, public opinion began to shift in the United States. Several recent opinion polls support this suggestion.
Most young Democrats began to look negatively at Israel and support the occupied Palestinian cause. But what is even more disturbing for Israel and its unwavering pillar of support, President Donald J. Trump, is that the genocide created a divide within the latter’s MAGA movement.
With prominent MAGA figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens beginning to question the wisdom of America’s blind support for Israel and its psychopathic leader Benjamin Netanyahu, the game was beginning to change. Trump could neither ignore nor attack this influential segment of his staunch support base.
This division, along with the Trump family’s business ties to 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 in eventually asking Israel to stop its ruthless genocidal military campaign against the Palestinians of Gaza.
While the opinions of users, regardless of who it favored.
Brandishing the threat of shutting it down, Trump forced the Chinese owners to sell TikTok’s US operations to Larry Ellison, the billionaire owner of Oracle, whose son also owns/controls Paramount and therefore all of the influential CBS News’ content in the US. Ellison is a staunch friend/funder of Israel and the FOI.
With the wealth and social media empires owned by three of the richest men in the world (their collective value exceeds a trillion and a half dollars) now firmly under the control of the sympathizers and supporters of the genocidal Zionists, it will be difficult to say how any new conflict or renewed genocide in Gaza will cause content to freely reach these platforms. The loopholes that existed before and allowed for greater openness will surely be plugged now.
Israel killed more than 200 journalists in Gaza and blocked foreign media from entering the Strip to prevent news from influencing public opinion. It failed mainly because of the images on social networks. Will this tightening of control through algorithms on social networks change the flow of information and its impact on global public opinion? Or can the large number of users force these commercial companies not to censor at will?
The writer is a former Dawn editor.
abbas.nasir@hotmail.com
Published in Amanecer, October 12, 2025.
