The world was shocked on the morning of October 7th when news of massacres at a music festival and in kibbutz homes spread from Israel. The brutal attack was carried out by the terrorist organizations Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The war in the Middle East had started again.
Immediately, a global information war broke out on social media. It involves the parties to the conflict, their allies and supporters, anyone with a cell phone on social media channels such as X (formerly Twitter), Telegram, Tik Tok, Instagram and Facebook.
Telegram and X are the main channels of information warfare. More than a billion people use them alone.
Weapons are videos, images, information, opinions – including false information and fake videos.
Hamas did not hide its well-prepared attack. It posted videos of its brutality almost in real time. Hamas Telegram channel sent over a thousand messages on October 7th. From there, many of the attackers’ videos have spread primarily to X.
This information war has a lot of fuel. A small strip of land at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea is the intersection where the world’s biggest conflicts are raging. It divides east and west, north and south, left and right, violently also the people of western countries.
The victims of the real war are especially the thousands of civilians who died in the Hamas terrorist attack and Israel’s counterattacks in Gaza. Victims of the information war can be considered those who have been misled by false information and fake videos.
Many social media posts come from sources we don’t know.
– We are happy to believe what we already believe in advance. We are usually the first to grasp what supports our own idea, National Defense University professor Aki-Mauri Huhtinen says.
We asked information warfare experts what social media users should know about the information war raging around Hamas and Israel.
The lesson of the Gaza hospital: Wait a moment before taking a stand
Fast-paced information transmission leads to the fact that it is easy to take a stand with incorrect information. That’s apparently what happened in the Gaza hospital attack. Several Finnish politicians also fell for it on social media.
Western media reported on the evening of October 17, with information from Hamas, that Israel has struck a hospital in Gaza and as many as 500-800 people have died.
As the day dawned, it was revealed that Hamas’ information may not have been true. The damage to the hospital, the small hole in the parking lot and the absence of explosive debris did not point to a devastating Israeli bomb, but possibly to the Palestinian organizations’ own rocket.
This preliminary conclusion has been reached by several Western intelligence organizations and independent researchers of so-called open sources.
In X at least @Geoconfirmed, @OAlexanderDK, @Nrg8000 mixed Bellingcat have published on the subject, an open source analyst Emil Kastehelmi tells.
– The key in this hospital case were the claims of 500-800 dead, for which there was no evidence. Despite that, the claim was published in many media, says Kastehelmi.
He belongs to the Finnish open source intelligence group to Black Bird Group, which monitors and produces information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Now the group also follows events in the Middle East.
Open sources include, for example, footage from battlefields, satellite data and press releases from different parties.
The hospital case highlighted the fact that you have to get your message out quickly or someone else will fill the information gap, National Defense University doctoral researcher, lieutenant colonel Teemu Saressalo says.
According to Saressalo, Israel reacted slowly because it was investigating the matter. The media has subsequently corrected the course of events, but the first shock sought by Hamas in its favor had already occurred.
Saressalo is doing a dissertation on information influence in the military conflicts of the early 2000s. He has studied the information operations of Israel and also of Hamas.
Hamas spread fake news – what about Israel?
Hamas announcements are viewed with even more suspicion after the hospital incident.
– Source criticism regarding Gaza is difficult, says doctoral researcher Saressalo.
It is in Hamas’s interests to exaggerate the destruction caused by Israel. Israel, on the other hand, generally wants to turn the discussion about the destruction of Gaza into the fault of Hamas.
Gaza’s Ministry of Health publishes high numbers of civilian casualties, but Israel says the ministry is under Hamas control and its information is incorrect.
– Basically, I would rate the Israeli sources as more truthful than the Palestinian ones. However, there has been a fairly large freedom of the press in Israel, and the media can also be very critical of the government and the armed forces, even though the freedom of the press has been threatened during the current government, Saressalo says.
Professor Aki-Mauri Huhtinen estimates that Israel’s disinformation can also be curbed by the fact that getting caught up in fake news could weaken the West’s sympathy and support for Israel.
According to Emil Kastehelme, in Israel’s communication it is also worth paying attention to what is left unsaid: such as whether Israel has ever made some mistakes in its own Palestinian policy.
Hamas has also presented false information about the killing of civilians, among other things. The Hamas leader claimed in an interview with an Arab channelthat Hamas does not intentionally kill civilians, even though Hamas has shared its own videos of it.
Saressalo has not found Israel spreading fake news during this war. – Of course, this does not mean that this could not have happened.
In social media, for example, proof has been obtained from Israel of claims that the attackers had cut off the heads of dozens of babies. Thing has found out among others, the American NBC channel.
Does Russia also have a hand in fake news?
The viewpoints of the parties to the conflict are repeated in social media. Most people do condemn the brutal attack by Hamas, but after that the dispute begins as to why it has come to this.
The dispute is also fueled by false information and fake videos, which have been watched by hundreds of millions of people in recent weeks. These fake videos have been studied by, among other things news agency Reuters and news channel Sky News. has also reported on the subject.
It often remains unclear from which source the fake videos are in the first place. In addition to the parties to the war and their supporters, false information can also be spread by other state actors.
Emil Kastehelmi says that Russian actors have spread a video on social media, according to which Hamas has western weapons imported from Ukraine. The person behind the video is unknown.
According to Kastehelmi, the weapons depicted in the video could be, for example, Russian war booty from Ukraine. He also considers it possible that individual Ukrainian weapons have actually ended up in Hamas through black market trade.
However, Russia has an interest in confusion.
– The confusion of the information environment serves Russia. Russia’s idea is that the situational picture of the world’s crises should be as foggy as possible, which affects democracies in such a way that there is no real common line, says Professor Aki-Mauri Huhtinen.
“Social media is like goldfish in a vase”
According to Professor Huhtinen, social media platforms have made it possible for the information environment to be “polluted”. The spread of false information is accelerated by the nature of social media: people exchange their opinions and feelings there.
– Social media is like goldfish in a vase, they bump into the wall in droves, turn and go in the other direction, Huhtinen describes.
Many build their image of events through social media because it is fast and addictive, real-time news around the clock.
– The video clips are spreading, they have sounds and feelings with them. That’s where image distortions take place, and one’s own stereotypes are reinforced.
Even if the videos are revealed to be false, it may not come to the attention of their viewers or even be ignored.
It is not in the nature of social media that the conversation ends with some truth. It doesn’t apologize and correct things like traditional media.
– People’s relationship with reliable journalism and mainstream media is different, Huhtinen estimates.
You can also make money on social media with wrong information
The spread of false information can also be accelerated by financial motives, both on the part of social media companies and its users.
So far, social media companies have not seriously curbed the spread of false information.
Now the EU has demanded from social media platforms an explanation of what they have done to prevent the spread of illegal content and disinformation about the war between Hamas and Israel.
According to press reports, at least Meta and X have said that they will increase resources to remedy the situation. After the media highlighted the fake videos on X, there have also been comments about their origin.
Professor Huhtinen estimates that disinformation cannot be prevented by the actions of social media companies.
– I don’t think that any company that makes a financial profit has the resources to invest in checking the facts and cleaning up the information environment as much as is required.
Social media companies have also made reforms that have rather promoted the spread of disinformation.
The richest man in the world Elon Musk’s after becoming the owner of Twitter, paid verification of accounts was introduced. The blue symbol next to the username verifies the identity of the account user. Account verification costs eight dollars a month.
Users of verified accounts are also paid for visibility. It doesn’t matter what material you share. It also encourages the spread of misinformation because there is a lot of demand for it.
– The more a message has been viewed, the more it has been thumbed up or commented on, it attracts people like honey, says Aki-Mauri Huhtinen.
Emil Kastehelmi says he receives 10-30 dollars a month from X for visibility. He has about 100,000 followers. Kastehelmi doesn’t post very often, usually a few messages a week.
The situation may be different for mega-level operators. Kastehelmi mentions an American political activist Jackson Hinkle, who has over 1.5 million followers on X. He is known as a fierce critic of mainstream media, Ukraine and Israel.
– Such a single actor can significantly influence the narratives. At least it doesn’t make it easier to promote the right information, says Kastehelmi.
Can you trust anyone on social media?
Social media is still not a cesspool of war propaganda. High-quality information is shared by many experts and open source researchers, among others.
You can get into murky waters especially when you encounter unknown and nameless sources.
Professor Huhtinen advises that you shouldn’t immediately trust anything 100%.
– Checking information and fact-checking takes time. I also went to watch the mainstream media. You should move on quite a few channels.
Huhtinen hopes that there will soon be automated tools to help social media users with which they can check the origin of videos themselves, for example, because social media platforms do not do that at least yet.
Teemu Saressalo advises that one analytical way to try to distinguish false information from facts is to ask what is the source and content of the message, who is it aimed at, what medium has been used and what effect has been sought.
– The more provocative and rabble-rousing the message, the more critical you have to be.
According to Emil Kastehelme, alarm bells should ring if someone constantly makes scandalous revelations that go against the flow of other information.
He advises to check what social media sources have communicated in the past and whether the traditional media has quoted them, because it filters out unreliable actors quite well.
Difficult cases are those that communicate behind a nickname. They can also produce high-quality information, but hide their identity for security reasons, for example.
Kastehelmi warns that all those who use the OSINT prefix, i.e. those posing as open source researchers, do not practice real open source intelligence, but mostly post individual videos, for example.