Israel-Hamas exchange missile attacks on Social Media

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15 Nov 2012

by admin

The Israeli defense forces and a Hamas brigade have taken the bloody-war to Social media.

Now both bitter enemies are involved in a sledging game. The outcome would images of the dead and wounded appearing on Google pages.
Ironically both parties have already posted graphic pictures of the dead and wounded children on Social media.

When Clicked Hamas Site, this message pops-up

The IDF has not allowed the Hamas brigade to stay top of the propaganda machine. Every social media site is filled with details about impending offensive and real time updates about airstrikes on Gaza enclave. They also just started a Tumblr account that is littered with pro-Israel propaganda, including a photo showing a cartoon of an Israeli family in the crosshairs of a Hamas target with the message “Israeli civilians are Hamas’s target.”
Spreading information and even propaganda through social media channels in times of violent conflict is new territory for internet companies. The Arab Spring is often cited as Twitter’s defining moment. In that case, Middle Eastern citizens used the service to communicate with each other and the press in order to foment revolution against totalitarian governments.

But this time, it’s different. As Peter Kafka of AllThingsD noted, Israel is, in essence, “using the Internet as weapon,” employing the same tactics as dissidents in the Arab Spring to spread a message without a middleman. There is something grotesque and disturbing about two parties with a long history of conflict live-narrating the launching of bombs that kill civilians and destroy communities. There is no empowerment or revolution here: just a dark, sinking feeling as we watch the bloodshed unfold in real time.
And the platforms that are allowing both the IDF and Alqassam Brigades to spread their messages? Faced with a new frontier of social media manipulation, either YouTube or Twitter really knows what to do.

Missile Launching site of Hamas

It’s difficult to nail down whether or not the content disseminated by both the Hamas and IDF accounts violates Twitter’s terms of service. One Twitter rule explicitly bans the “direct, specific threats of violence against others,” which certain IDF tweets do seem to violate. The Daily Dot reports that the IDF Spokesperson Twitter account was temporarily suspended for about 40 minutes today, but was then reinstated. As Twitter doesn’t comment on the status of individual accounts, it’s difficult to suss out what the reasoning behind this was; perhaps it was automatically suspended after being flagged for removal by users. Whatever the case, its back up now, tweeting about the rockets flying between Tel Aviv and Gaza. (A fake account, @IDFSpokesman, has been suspended.)
YouTube, meanwhile, also temporarily banned a video uploaded by the IDF that shows a “pinpoint strike” that killed Ahmed Jabari, one of Hamas’s military leaders. The video was put back up after AllThingsD pointed it out. YouTube told them:
“With the massive volume of videos on our site, sometimes we make the wrong call. When it’s brought to our attention that a video has been removed mistakenly, we act quickly to reinstate it.”

As one social media analyst told the BBC, the actions of both the IDF and Alqassam Brigades on Twitter put the service in a difficult position. “They want to preserve their position as a carrier service that doesn’t editorialize,” he said. “On the other hand, they have terms and conditions that must be adhered to.”
“This is not a decision a couple of hundred engineers in North California want to be making,” he added.
And yet, as hash tagged insults and news of bombs continue to fly across these services; it’s a decision social media platforms may have to make sooner or later.
 Jessica Roy is a reporter for Betabeat and the New York Observer. Follow Jessica on Twitter or via RSS. jroy@observer.com