ON Oct 6, 2023, you could not have imagined a world in which Israel was as widely hated as it is today; its very name is now a byword for genocide, systematic rape, atrocity and infanticide. In video after video, we have seen not only the depredations and war crimes of Israeli forces, but also the joy and pride on the faces of the genocidaire soldiers and the generals and government officials who direct their actions. For the vast majority of us, these images cannot be viewed with anything other than revulsion and disgust; it’s the most human of instincts to feel sympathy for Israel’s victims and rage against the unrepentant perpetrators.
But when Israel and its supporters look out at this new world, they don’t see that all this fury is caused by their actions; instead, they blame ‘antisemitism’, a tropey accusation that has long since lost its sting, and they point to social media — and in particular TikTok — for spreading anti-Israel sentiments. It’s not the atrocities that make us so hated, they believe, it’s the algorithms. And so, the thinking goes, if we can bully, buy or otherwise control social media platforms the way we control the bulk of mainstream Western media, anti-Israel sentiment could be managed. If we scrub the digital archives of our genocide, then it will be forgotten. And this is exactly what they’re doing.
First, they came for TikTok, and with good reason; Northeastern University conducted a study on pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli messaging on TikTok in the immediate aftermath of Oct 7. They found that there were 170,430 pro-Palestinian posts while pro-Israel posts numbered 8,843. But as we all should know, it’s not just about volume but about engagement too, and here we see that there were 236 million views for pro-Palestinian posts and a comparatively measly 14m for pro-Israel posts.
And in the following two years, the trend has not reversed but has in fact become progressively more and more pro-Palestinian. In fact, while pro-Israel posts and views spiked immediately after Oct 7, as a reaction to the event and then started to decline (as is typical of posts related to a major development), the pro-Palestinian posts are increasing in the pattern one ascribes to a sustained and broad-based movement.
Netanyahu is already celebrating.
Zionists identified this issue early on with Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of America’s Anti-Defamation League saying in a leaked audio “we have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem”, which needed to be solved. In typical Zionist fashion, they did so by manipulating the levers of US politics and throwing money at the problem. Suddenly a campaign started in the US accusing the Chinese government of manipulating TikTok’s algorithm and of accessing the private data of American users and demanding that TikTok’s American operations be sold off. It was a transparent ploy, because the real reason TikTok is being targeted has nothing to do with China and everything to do with Israel and its image.
And so we saw Republicans and Democrats alike line up against TikTok in the attempt to make Israel great again, and TikTok was forced to divest its US operations. But who would buy TikTok? Here we see a consortium of buyers emerge, with the primary one being Oracle. Oracle itself was founded by US billionaire Larry Ellison, who was (for a short while) the richest man in the world. Ellison is also the single largest private donor to the Israeli army and otherwise a staunch ‘Israel first’ Zionist. As for Oracle, its former CEO Safra Catz openly wrote in a private email to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak that “we have to embed the love and respect for Israel in American culture”, while adding in another statement that Oracle’s commitment to Israel was “second to none”. You can then imagine what TikTok will look like once Oracle is in control.
Netanyahu is already celebrating; in a recent talk with his cronies he said that “the most important [battlefield] is social media and the most important purchase that is going on right now is … TikTok”.
And with that battle won their sights are now not just on other social media outlets with the next major target being X (Twitter). And on cue, we see a slate of articles in Israeli media decrying X as the new home of antisemitism. Netanyahu isn’t worried though.
“Elon is a friend … we should talk to him,” he says. And he will. And Elon will obey. They’re coming for AI as well; the government of Israel has awarded a $6m contract to a former Trump campaign manager to create new pro-Israel websites and videos which LLMs like ChatGPT and others will be trained on.
The goal is to feed them Israeli propaganda so that they will, in turn, churn it out. This, then, is how a genocide is forgotten.
The writer is a journalist.
Published in Dawn, October 20th, 2025
