First, Hamas Took Hostages. Then, It Took Over Their Social Media.
Reading Time: 6 minutesHamas took over hostages’ social media accounts. It could be an alarming window into the future of war.
On Oct. 7, friends and relatives of Gali Shlezinger Idan, an Israeli who lives in a kibbutz near the border with Gaza, started getting messages to check her Facebook page. When they did, according to reporting from the New York Times’ Sheera Frenkel and Talya Minsberg, they found something horrifying: a livestream showing Idan and her family held hostage by Hamas gunmen. There is the sound of gunshots, and mortars. At one point in the 43-minute livestream, Idan tells her children something along the lines of ‘Stay down—I can’t lose another child today.’
Idan’s oldest daughter was killed and her husband was taken hostage. The gunmen eventually left Idan and the two children in the video—but not before their loved ones witnessed much of the ordeal on social media.
As hard as it is to hear stories like this one, they are also instructive: They tell us about a new way of waging war. For as long as humans have fought each other, they’ve told stories about it—now those stories have 21st-century tools.
On Friday’s episode of What Next: TBD, I spoke with Frenkel, who covers tech for the Times, about Hamas’ social media strategy. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Lizzie O’Leary: When you heard about these livestreams, what did you think?
Sheera Frenkel: On Oct. 7 there had been a number of Israelis who spoke to radio and TV and described seeing livestreams. I immediately kind of was like, ‘Livestreams? Is that possible?’ When I saw it for myself, it’s shocking—Hamas gunmen were able to livestream themselves holding a family hostage for 43 minutes; in another case, they livestreamed themselves holding a family for over an hour.
How did the gunmen get access to the social media accounts?
They entered the home; they asked for their cellphones and their IDs. That was the first thing they asked for. In this case, they took Gali’s cellphone, unlocked it, opened up Facebook, and began the livestream.
Last week, I interviewed members of Hamas that had run social media for the organization in the past. Hamas has a political wing where they develop films and political campaigns for their members. So they actually have a fairly established comms team, and they described it as a very premeditated strategy meant to appeal to their supporters and show what they had done. Hamas has Facebook accounts; they could have opened up their own Facebook accounts and begun to livestream a video if they wanted to. But the decision to take the cellphone of someone they were holding hostage and use their Facebook account to livestream it was very specific and deliberate. It happened in at least four cases that we could document.
How long did it take for the tech companies to realize this was happening and to disable these accounts?
In most cases, the accounts were disabled in 24 to 36 hours. Quite a while, as far the families were concerned. In one case, a young woman was taken hostage from a music festival near the Gaza border, and her Facebook account remained active for three to four days after she was taken. The family continued to get messages on it from people that they presume were holding their daughter hostage.
You were a Middle East reporter for 10 years, you’ve lived in Gaza, and you’ve covered previous wars in the region. Have you ever seen anything like this before?
No. This is very much a new tactic, and we called up and spoke to people who were experts in extremist groups like Hamas. I remember ISIS pioneering the use of social media to spread their viewpoint across the world. I covered it. I was in Iraq, and I was in Syria, and their ability to use the attention economy of social media to get people to watch really horrible things—beheading videos, hostage videos—that was, at the time, unprecedented. But they had not thought of this strategy or been able to implement this strategy of hijacking the social media feeds of people you’re holding hostage. That’s something I’ve never seen before, and I think it was particularly effective in this case because so many civilians were involved.
As you mentioned, you talked to Hamas about their social media strategy, and I’m really interested in the way they have put thought into using different platforms and how those platforms then spread messages out. Can you walk me through that?
The strategy they’ve come up with is they start on Telegram, which is a messaging app—and, I think it’s fair to say, has almost no content moderation. Hamas has quite a few Telegram channels in Arabic and in English, and in other languages as well, where they just seed videos and photos and slogans and messages. They’ll post a new video or photo, and then they’ll say, ‘Please spread this on Twitter and TikTok. … And here’s translations to other languages. If you’re French speaking, please post it with this language. If you’re Spanish speaking, post it …’ It’s very cohesive and well-thought-out.
Largely, they tell people to share on Twitter. They’ve openly commented that Twitter is very easy to post things to right now. We have to remember that when Elon Musk took control of the platform a year ago now, he fired most of the established trust and safety team, many of whom actually had experience in, specifically in Hamas, but also just in extremist organizations. When that expertise left the building, they lost a lot of their skill set in removing these accounts quickly. So Hamas tells them to go to Twitter, and they also tell them to go to TikTok and YouTube, and they even give instructions on how you can speed up the video or slow down the video or clip the video so that if those companies take down one version of it, maybe another version can live online.
Hamas is supposed to be banned on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. Has that worked?
I think that the Meta-owned companies have been very quick to take Hamas accounts down. They struggle with it, though. Hamas also operates schools; they are a political organization that informs people when power and electricity is going to be on or off. So there are Hamas pages that Facebook has really struggled with. Like, ‘Wait, well, if this is a page that’s letting people know when the first day of school is or when water and power will be resumed to their neighborhoods, is that something that we should be taking down?’ But by and large, when something is posting graphic videos or veers into the territory of posting propaganda that’s supportive of Hamas’ military wing, they are very quick to take it down. Twitter less so. I’m still struggling to figure out TikTok because I’ve seen some videos removed within minutes, I would say, and then others that have lived there for hours, and I can’t see rhyme or reason for why some are being removed and some aren’t. I think TikTok is a little bit more whack-a-mole at the moment.
We’ve come full circle, in a way. I’m thinking back to those ISIS videos in 2014, when content moderation was not robust. Things went up on YouTube that were horrifying. But then social media companies seemed to put a decent amount of effort and time and staffing into content moderation that helped stop some of this. At the same time, in 2019, in Christchurch, New Zealand, a far-right extremist killed 51 people in a mosque and livestreamed it on Facebook. What can the social media companies do with this, other than, as you said, play whack-a-mole?
Play whack-a-mole, hire ever-increasing teams to be responsive and to freeze this kind of activity when it happens. I mentioned that Facebook has been relatively quick to take this stuff down. They’ve also, since COVID, lost people from their security team and their trust and safety team, and so their teams are also smaller than they used to be.
For Twitter, Elon Musk decimated their trust and safety team. So that’s an extreme example. But all the companies have been reducing their head count and making these teams smaller. And that makes it slower—but even if they had more people, that’s never going to be 100 percent effective.
As you know, it’s incredibly hard to report from Gaza. Some of the social media that has come out has given people a voice, and yet that can be so easily weaponized to inflict harm. How do companies reckon with that—being a tool of information and connection, but also harm and destruction?
It’s one of the hardest things happening in Gaza right now. There are a lot of people who live in Gaza who depend on social media to try and find out where they’re going to get water or fuel, or where food is coming in. The U.N. provides food to over 1 million people who live in the Gaza Strip, and social media is one way that they tell one another, ‘Oh, the U.N. food operation center is happening here today.’ Especially in a time of war, where there’s widespread bombing happening across the Gaza Strip, people are letting one another know where it’s safe to be through social media.
You have this deep background covering the Middle East and conflict, and also covering tech companies. How do you think the role of technology and social media has evolved in this region in the past decade?
In so many ways, what’s happening in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank is a battle of narratives. It’s been fought since the 1940s, potentially even before, of whose version of the story is the right one. Is it the version that serves the state of Israel? Is it the version that serves the Palestinian people? As the years have gone on, as the decades have gone on, each side has become really deeply entrenched in their own narrative of things. Technology, for the most part, has served that. These tech companies, specifically the social media companies, have created really deep echo chambers.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/10/hamas-social-media-strategy.html
Ref: slate
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