| ONE YEAR OUT — It’s been a full year into all-out war in the Middle East, but the battlefield extends far beyond Gaza and Lebanon — it’s raging across social media platforms, state-backed news outlets and messaging apps. Both pro-Israeli and pro-Hamas actors are waging information war to create a dizzying array of truths, half-truths and straight up fabrications that’ll only give us a taste of influence operations of the future. “Things have worsened compared to a year ago,” McKenzie Sadeghi, the AI and foreign influence editor at misinformation tracker NewsGuard, tells MC. “The aims of these campaigns have also evolved.” — Disinfo by the numbers: Since last October, researchers at NewsGuard have now identified 179 myths about the Israel-Hamas war, spread across 389 websites in multiple languages. It’s even outpacing their data for the number of falsehoods from the Russia and Ukraine war (at about 250) which began a full year and a half earlier. — Equal opportunity offenders: Pro-Hamas disinformation efforts have ranged from manipulated images to fake news reports mimicking Western media outlets. In April, pro-Iranian groups resorted to portraying its attacks against Israel as success by using outdated and unrelated military footage. In pro-Iranian circles, one big narrative on messaging platforms has to do with weapons to Israel by Western allies, while Kremlin circles are also “very active” in the Middle East space, says Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab resident fellow Ruslan Trad. “It is important to stress that in the last two months, the narratives have gone from being pro-Gaza and pro-Palestinian to being overtly pro-Iran and pro-Hezbollah,” Trad tells Morning Cyber. But it's the pro-Israel campaigns that have been able to penetrate the upper echelon of U.S. political society, such as the widely-shared but unsubstantiated report of Hamas beheading 40 babies during the Oct. 7 attack that was repeated by President Joe Biden. — State actors enter the chat: Iran, Russia, and China have emerged as the key players in spreading false pro-Hamas narratives, often converging on themes that undermine Western influence. These state attackers are alleged to be behind nearly 400 articles about pro-Palestinian protests on U.S. college campuses in just two weeks, according to NewsGuard. Israel’s government has also been linked to disinformation campaigns, including one state-backed effort targeting over 120 U.S. lawmakers on social media trying to downplay human rights abuses, which we reported earlier this year. — Platform problems persist: Social media giants also look like they’re struggling to keep pace with the flood of disinformation. NewsGuard found that on X, 74 percent of the most viral misinformation came from “verified” blue check-mark accounts. — What’s next: The convergence of the multiple war fronts in the Middle East, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and the nearing U.S. presidential election just means that more room is being made for more sophisticated influence campaigns. “Bad actors are capitalizing on these events to promote narratives that undermine Western influence and exacerbate societal divisions at a time when societies are distracted by multiple crises,” Sadeghi said. “The combination of ongoing conflicts and political turmoil has provided a much more fertile ground compared to a year ago.”
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