How foreign propaganda peddlers turn Palestinian pain into their profit

Modern warfare is no longer simply troops and missiles. It seems most decisive battles now take place on the screens of our computers and handheld technology.

Since the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel and Jews throughout the world have faced a relentless digital campaign designed to reshape global public opinion. Intelligence estimates put the direct annual cost of funding what is ultimately propaganda and misinformation at between £450 million and £1 billion. However, focusing solely on the cash spent misses another true danger.

The real threat lies in its extraordinary leverage.

Through online outrage, hostile states, militant groups and antisemites turn modest initial outlays into a global propaganda machine worth an estimated £8 billion to £22 billion in exposure. They do not need to buy global public opinion outright. They just need to light the match.

The mechanics behind this cognitive assault are strikingly simple. Hostile actors, including Iranian and Russian state-linked entities alongside militant media arms, and groups like the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, produce a steady stream of inflammatory videos, altered images, and fake news articles. They deploy thousands of automated accounts to share this content simultaneously. And anyone who counters them online faces an immediate backlash.

Social media platforms are engineered to reward conflict, and no one is doing anything to stop it. Their systems automatically push emotionally charged material to millions of users to keep them scrolling, millions who have very scant knowledge of the genuine situation. The platforms effectively subsidise the global distribution of foreign propaganda for free.

Once these misleading stories gain traction, political commentators, well-meaning activists, and casual users repost and debate them. And some British political parties and politicians, openly hostile to Israel and Jews, but for some strange reason never called to account by the Parliamentary Standards Commission, purposefully push this narrative too. At this point, the hostile state’s spending drops to zero, while the reach grows exponentially, and spreaders profit from it.

Countering this threat does not require suppressing legitimate political debate or free speech. It requires bringing basic accountability to the digital sphere through three straightforward steps:

• Enforce platform friction: Social media companies must be required to slow down the distribution of viral content during major crises when automated accounts trigger unnatural surges in activity, allowing time for basic checks.

• Require Digital Origin stamps: All online pictures and videos should carry clear provenance tags so the public can instantly see whether media has been artificially generated or tampered with. Using images, for example, of the famine in Sudan to convey a supposed famine in Gaza should simply be unacceptable.

• Cut off covert funding: Western governments must target the financial networks powering foreign bot farms with the same rigour used against international money laundering.

Protecting democratic discourse depends on securing a shared reality. By stripping away the artificial reach that social media grants provide to hostile foreign states, open societies can ensure that public debate is shaped by truth, rather than manufactured anger.

Remember, only the social media platforms and the creators (and often the spreaders) benefit financially.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians receive nothing.