Israel’s year-long war in the Gaza Strip has shattered multiple precedents: it’s among the most destructive in recent history; the most deadly for journalists; it triggered the swiftest descent into famine since World War II. It is also changing how the world learns about war. With foreign reporters barred from entering Gaza, many local reporters evacuated and most media bureaus shuttered, information has flowed predominantly through social media, whether Instagram, TikTok, Telegram, Youtube or X. This means that much of what the world sees is coming from local reporters and amateurs using their own social media accounts — and some have catapulted into global prominence. One Gaza journalist has amassed more Instagram followers than Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Gaza is not the first war in the social media era, but it erupted at a pivotal moment — with social media increasingly a go-to source for news, and platforms rolling back their content moderation policies. “This war seems to be a tipping point that shows the power of individual emotional content and its ability to change strategy and policy,” said Ben Jensen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who studies political violence and technology. Social media played a key role in the conflict from the start: On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas used Telegram to stream its attack on Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 250 hostage. In some cases, militants took over their victims’ accounts and livestreamed their captivity and torture. Independent Israeli photojournalists sped to the scenes of devastation, using social platforms to post photos of bodies, militants in the streets and reporters ducking for cover from gunmen. Within hours, the Israeli army announced its response — on social media — of a “large-scale operation to defend Israeli civilians.” On the platforms, individual Israeli accounts vied for attention with the military and with mainstream news sites and journalists. As the conflict unfolded, Gaza became increasingly isolated from the flow of mainstream global information. Israel’s Supreme Court upheld a ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza; Hamas, designated a terrorist group by the U.S. and EU, was blocked on Telegram, Meta, Google and X. The Israeli army damaged or destroyed some 70 press facilities, according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate. At least 120 Palestinian journalists and media workers were killed in Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Local journalists and amateurs stepped into the gap, and their posts vaulted into international attention as they showed the aftermath of Israeli bombardment by land, air and sea that killed more than 42,000 Palestinians. One of the most prominent was Motaz Azaiza, who was a photographer with a small Instagram account before the war. His photos and videos of people pulling bodies out of bombed homes and a strike on Gaza’s oldest church ultimately drew more than 18 million followers on the platform before he evacuated Gaza with his family. Azaiza’s coverage — and reach — caught the eye of Hala Rharrit, who served in the U.S. State Department as the Arabic language spokesperson, and worried the gruesome images from Gaza could result in a threat to U.S. national security. “One of the points I was stressing to the State Department for months was the impact of social media and how we are vastly underestimating it,” she said in an interview. “The Arab public was consuming these horrific images. Our message was being rejected because it was ignoring the facts on the ground.” She suggested her State Department colleagues invite Azaiza to meet while he was visiting D.C. Correspondence seen by DFD showed one State Department official noting Azaiza had met with other world leaders, but walked away “with the same annoyance that they listen but don’t act and stop the genocide….what additional can we offer?” Ultimately, the State Department officials dropped the idea. Rharrit resigned from State in April. Azaiza and the State Department did not reply to DFD questions on the matter. Reporting direct to social media can give immediate, unfiltered coverage — but also raises familiar questions of bias and trustworthiness. The charge of anti-Israel bias on TikTok last year partly drove the Congressional effort to ban the app. (TikTok denied it favors Palestinians.). Supporters of Israel have used tech platforms to counter-message. The cofounder of the advocacy group StandWithUs said its social accounts backing Israel had attracted huge followings over the past year, growing by a factor of 10 on YouTube and nearly tripling on Instagram to 1.4 million. When the Palestinian influencer Bisan Owda was nominated for an Emmy for an Al Jazeera documentary based in part on her Instagram videos from Gaza, her critics pressured the Emmys to rescind the honor, claiming Owda had links to the U.S.-designated terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which she denied. She ultimately won the Emmy in September. Bias charges run the other way too. Gaza creators, Human Rights Watch and the Queen of Jordan have accused platforms of blocking or downgrading Palestinian war content. (Meta’s oversight board has said it initially used its automated moderation tools “more aggressively” to remove posts showing graphic depictions of Israeli hostages and Palestinian casualties of airstrikes. Since then, the company has pared back some of its moderation, instead resorting to case-by-case rulings on key words and phrases that might be linked to violence.) The online torrent can create new issues on the ground, said Jensen of CSIS, from putting troops in physical harm, to providing real-time evidence of illegal acts, to providing fodder for foreign manipulation. Some Israeli soldiers have shared footage online in which they appear to blow up Palestinian buildings with no purpose and abuse Palestinian detainees, prompting accusations of war crimes. The Israeli army told DFD “exceptional incidents are addressed in various ways, including command and disciplinary measures.” Gaza a year into the conflict has seen some of its most recognized storytellers killed or leave the enclave. The influencers who remain in Gaza say the war is wearing them down. Journalist Hind Khoudary, 29, said she gained 1.2 million Instagram followers in a year of covering the war. Now she is publishing more via news agencies and less on her own channels. “As we marked a year, I am exhausted and drained,” she wrote DFD. “I am actually quiet and not active the same way because I am very traumatized from everything I saw.”
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