Disinformation has flourished across a range of online platforms in the month since Hamas launched its bloody attack on Israel, fuelled by weak content regulation on X, formerly Twitter, and Telegram and at times propelled by state actors.
Widely shared faked news and false claims include efforts to downplay the horror of Hamas’s cross-border attack on 7 October through to distasteful allegations that Palestinians, already under heavy bombardment, are faking scenes of violence.
Jackson Hinkle, 22, an American far-right social media influencer with 2 million followers on X, formerly Twitter, who has styled himself as a “Maga communist”, claimed, without evidence, at the end of October that Hamas fighters shot fewer than 100 people, mostly armed settlers.
The death toll is estimated at more than 1,200 people, and they were killed inside Israel’s borders so could not have been settlers. But this was only one of Hinkle’s untruths: in the same 28 October posting he said that half of the Israelis killed during the Hamas assault were soldiers, many of whom died “during tank shelling”.
Hinkle, once a young supporter of the leftwing Democrat Bernie Sanders, has been banned from YouTube and Instagram for spreading disinformation, but thrives on X where his 7 October denial post has 5.1m views. The influencer cited the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as his source, although below the post sits a denial from the title.
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