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Away from the real world and the killing fields of Gaza, another war rages between pro-Palestine activists on the one hand and Israel’s high-tech military, supported by IT giants primarily from the US, on the other. This conflict is taking place mainly on social media platforms across the digital sphere in a bid to sway global public opinion. The good news is that Israel is losing the war of algorithms.
Immediately after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, Israel’s propaganda machine kicked in to distort, exaggerate, and lie about the scale of the atrocities that took place on that day. The objective was to mobilize public opinion through mainstream Western media, by feeding them enough horror stories to justify Israel’s whole-scale retaliation against the people of Gaza under the banner of “Israel’s right to self-defense.”
Israel imposed a total shutdown of all news coming out of Gaza. It barred, as it continues to do today, all international media from entering the besieged enclave. The only version or narrative of what was taking place there was primarily through the well-established Israeli propaganda machine, the hasbara.
But while the Western mainstream media had no qualms about its reporters being barred from entering Gaza to carry out independent coverage of the war, they were happy to repeat and promote the Israeli narrative without verification. The only other source was and remains the tens of Palestinian journalists, native residents of Gaza, who were associated with Arab TV networks and many key Western news agencies and TV stations.
The onslaught on Gaza has been aired live by Arab TV networks, thanks to these Palestinian journalists, many of whom were deliberately targeted by Israel in order to silence them. As of late July 2025, at least 232 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its military campaign. That is the most significant number of journalists killed in a conflict since the Vietnam War.
Israel was winning the propaganda war by playing the victim, but then the tide began to change. While Western mainstream media looked the other way, Palestinian journalists and activists in the beleaguered strip started sharing videos and testimonies of the massacres on social media platforms. Initially, Israel used its influence to force platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and X to ban and shadow ban pro-Palestine users, as well as remove content that exposed the atrocities taking place in Gaza. That tactic worked for a while, but then users began boycotting such platforms and heading to other platforms like TikTok, where pro-Palestine content was tolerated.

Social media has transformed global outrage into protests.

Osama Al-Sharif

Israel could have won the digital war with minimum losses, were it not for its leaders who doubled down and allowed the Israeli military to unleash the most destructive bombing of a residential zone since the Second World War. It was impossible, with such a high number of casualties, to hide the images of slaughtered babies, maimed children, and wailing parents. Israel could not lie about the blowing up of hospitals, schools, universities, and places of worship. The floodgates burst open, and the social media platforms caved in.
While Israeli jets bombed and destroyed more than 90 percent of Gaza, social media has irreversibly altered the global understanding of the genocide in Gaza. Today, the daily reality in Gaza is transmitted directly to the world by its victims.
Viral hashtags such as #FreePalestine or #GazaUnderAttack have mobilized millions, sidelining mainstream media and challenging the dominant Western portrayal of Israel as a democratic outpost and as a recurrent victim. Instead, for much of the world, Israel stands increasingly accused of operating as a Western colonial and apartheid state in the heart of the Middle East, charged with war crimes documented in real time.
Social media has transformed global outrage into protests on university campuses, boycotts against complicit corporations, and, crucially, legal action. For instance, evidence gleaned from soldiers’ posts and digital archives — often collected by grassroots actors — has been used by organizations and even states when filing cases at the International Court of Justice.
The trail of legal pursuit is now extending to IT companies that have enabled Israel to weaponize untested artificial intelligence to hunt down Palestinians. Gaza has become a testing ground for future weapons of mass destruction.
In response to pro-Palestinian posts on social media, Israel uses bots, particularly AI-powered fake or automated accounts, to influence pro-Gaza algorithms and social media narratives by amplifying pro-Israeli content and sowing doubt within pro-Palestinian discussions. These bots rapidly respond to pro-Palestinian posts with pro-Israeli comments, creating a swarm of replies that can flood social media platforms almost immediately after Palestinian content is posted. The accounts often follow similar patterns and try to appear almost human.
Even then, pro-Palestine supporters have developed a robust set of strategies to counter the influence and narratives pushed by pro-Israel AI bots. Activists and organizations such as Tahaqaq (Palestinian Observatory for Fact-Checking and Media Literacy), and other independent fact-checkers actively monitor social media for AI-generated disinformation. They quickly investigate viral images and videos, exposing those that are deep fakes or manipulated, thus preventing bots from distorting the narrative unchallenged.
Activists and digital rights groups often publish evidence of AI bot networks — sometimes created by companies like the Israeli firm STOIC — flooding platforms with pro-Israel messaging.
In this war of algorithms, Israel is losing ground daily, and every time its army commits a war crime in Gaza. The technology alliance it created has not worked, and it has lost the initial narrative.
Today, we see millions of people protesting every week in support of Palestine. Israel’s hold on Western politicians is loosening as governments and leaders become aware of the seismic change that is taking place in their constituencies.
The war of algorithms is not over, but Israel is no longer able to thwart the global conscience movement it created through its atrocities, and as it carries out this “first livestreamed genocide,” as it has been described.

• Osama Al-Sharif is a journalist and political commentator based in Amman. X: @plato010