A recent analysis of around 900 potentially antisemitic social media posts revealed hundreds of them denied or distorted the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th and reached 26 million recipients in total.
CyberWell, an innovative tech nonprofit focused on monitoring for and combating the spread of antisemitism on social media, said it reviewed 910 potentially antisemitic posts on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X over the past month.
The organization said more than a third of the analyzed posts denied or distorted the attack of Hamas militants on Israel.
North of 38% of posts denied that Hamas militants and their allies raped Israelis during their attacks, and more than 36% of posts claimed that Israel was itself directly responsible for Hamas’ actions.
These posts were engaged with – reacted to, commented on, shared, or retweeted – more than 901,233 times, the report (PDF), released in advance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th, says.
“The morning of October 7th, Hamas militants sadistically recorded and, in some cases, even live-streamed their heinous attack on social media,” said CyberWell Founder and Executive Director Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor.
“Caught by surprise, these platforms rapidly became weapons of mass psychological terror during the attack, and once the true scope of terror was realized, are now being used by Hamas supporters to deny and distort the attack.”
For example, in an interview with Al Jazeera, the journalist Max Blumenthal – called by Haaretz a master of manipulation and a war crime denier – implied that, of the Israeli civilians who were killed, most were killed by the IDF: “How many Israelis were actually killed by the Israeli military, using the same doctrine of disproportionate force and the indiscriminate use of heavy weapons that we are now seeing in the Gaza strip?”
In more than three months since the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian group Hamas, the atrocities the militants committed have been well documented.
According to Cohen Montemayor, while all mainstream social media platforms have community standards policies prohibiting the denial of violent events, which has been extended in practice to include Holocaust denial, “these companies have yet to apply this policy to the denial of the events of October 7th, the largest violent atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust.”
In more than three months since the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian group Hamas, the atrocities the militants committed have been well documented.
In December, UN Women, the human rights group, condemned attacks by Hamas on Israel and said it was alarmed by “the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks.”
The group also called for the immediate release of all remaining hostages still held by Hamas and urged to announce a humanitarian ceasefire – something that Israel, relentlessly pounding Gaza for more than three months, refuses to deliberate.
The Guardian was told last week that Israel’s top police investigations unit, Lahav 433, is still pouring over 50,000 pieces of visual evidence and 1,500 witness testimonies with regard to instances of rape.
"The growing body of evidence about reported sexual violence is particularly harrowing," two UN-appointed independent experts also said in a statement at the beginning of January.
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