By Sara Miller, NoCamels -
An Israeli startup has identified tens of thousands of fake social media accounts that are supportive of Hamas, most of which were created more than a year ago and were largely inactive until the massive terror attacks in Israel on October 7.
At least 1,300 people were murdered when Hamas terrorists from Gaza struck Israeli homes and communities. Dozens more – including children, women and the elderly – were dragged into the coastal enclave as Hamas hostages.
In the aftermath of the attacks, Tel Aviv-based Cyabra, which monitors threats and misinformation on social media, has identified more than 40,000 fake accounts supportive of Hamas across all platforms.
And Cyabra’s VP of Marketing Rafi Mendelsohn tells NoCamels that they all sprung into action in a social media war that ran parallel to the brutal October 7 attacks.
This coordinated action by such a vast number of fake accounts, he says, points to an “enormous level” of planning and organization.
“Over 40,000 fake accounts that were pro-Hamas and Hamas sympathetic across the social media platforms… many of them had been created a year, year and a half in advance, and were kind of sitting [and] waiting,” Mendelsohn says.
“Then once everything started over the course of Saturday and Sunday [October 7 and 8], these accounts had actually posted hundreds of times having not done much previously in the year and a half before,” he explains.
The company describes itself as a “social threat intelligence” company, which works to expose online risk to individuals, institutions or even governments. It says its mission is to fight misinformation, claiming it can root out even the most sophisticated threats.
Unique AI software created by Cyabra quickly identifies malicious actors using social media and other online spaces such as comment sections, to spread false information.
According to Mendelsohn, Cyabra spotted three primary narratives being pushed on social media by these accounts, which he says required “a lot of coordination.”
The first narrative, disseminated by the fake accounts largely in Arabic for an Arab audience, claimed that the sheer number of Israeli hostages seized by Hamas meant that Israel was about to release Palestinian prisoners held in its jails.
The second narrative, which Mendelsohn says was mainly being pushed in English, highlighted the alleged humanity and compassion of Hamas towards its hostages.
Mendelsohn calls this second narrative “an influence operations campaign,” which rather than creating fake news, manipulates existing footage and imagery that people have likely already seen from reputable news sources and recontextualizes it to fit the Hamas narrative.
He cites the example of footage of Israelis being taken by force into Gaza, something that was widely aired by the established media outlets, but which was later cropped in such a way as to make it appear that they were not being ill-treated.
It is a phenomenon called “deceptive imagery persuasion,” Mendelsohn says. He points out that disinformation is not always about false information, but can also be about trying to sway people into believing a certain narrative over another.
“If you create a lie, you’ve got to convince people of that lie. Whereas if you take something that is kind of rooted in truth, or exists, and then you’re recontextualizing it in order to put out a false narrative, you might think it’s more real.”
The final narrative being promulgated by these fake accounts, he says, focused on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a long-standing flashpoint for tensions between Israel and Palestinains.
This third message was spread in English and Arabic and claimed that the purported threat by Israeli security forces to the mosque and its Muslim worshippers was so great that Hamas “didn’t really have a choice” but to act as it did.
The fact that these three narratives were being promoted in different languages, he says, shows “another layer of sophistication” in the activity of the fake accounts.
A similar level of sophistication, according to Mendelsohn, can be seen in the way in which these fake accounts use both pro-Hamas and pro-Israel hashtags in order to insert their content into as wide an audience as possible.
This “incredible” sophistication, he says, “is definitely more akin to a state level actor type operation.”
Cyabra is working with intelligence agencies, Mendelsohn says, without elaborating which. One of the things that the company has imparted to those intelligence agencies is how much personal information about the hostages themselves has been shared online.
This information, he warns, is a weapon that is being utilized by Hamas.
Mendelsohn says that the fake social media accounts such as the ones apparently created for the Hamas terror attacks on October 7 are one of “the key channels” that today’s enemies would look to using.
They have been successfully deployed by Russia during its invasion of Ukraine, and, according to Mendelsohn, they are an increasingly effective tactic.
It is, he says, “certainly cheaper than creating an army.”
