Heidi Levine / AP
Israeli riot police tries to block a Jewish right-wing man as clashes erupted between Arabs, police and Jews, in the mixed town of Lod, central Israel, Wednesday, May 12, 2021. As rockets from Gaza streaked overhead, Arabs and Jews fought each other on the streets below. Rioters torched vehicles, a restaurant and a synagogue in one of the worst spasms of communal violence that Israel has seen in years.
Wednesday, May 19, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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As rockets and bombs rain down in the Middle East, communal violence and social media misinformation fan the flames of the crisis.
Synagogues torched by Arab mobs. Jewish extremists retaliating by burning Arab-owned buildings. Beatings of innocents by both sides. Clashes occurring in so many places that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to deploy ground forces to restore order.
“I don’t think that, since the creation of the state of Israel, we’ve seen this kind of domestic violence,” Ami Ayalon, the former director of Israel’s equivalent of the FBI, told Vox. “We are not far from ... not a civil war, but a level of violence that I don’t know if we can control.”
Meanwhile, lies and misleading posts have spread across multiple platforms, and in some cases have been amplified by mainstream news media and officials. One high-profile example, as reported by The New York Times, occurred when the spokesman for Netanyahu retweeted a video that purported to show Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip launching rocket attacks on Israel from civilian areas.
But instead of providing proof that the militants were using civilians as human shields, the video actually was from 2018 and showed rocket attacks being launched in either Libya or Syria.
It was especially inflammatory because thousands of missiles have been directed at Israeli cities and it has been known for years that Hamas has placed missiles and military equipment inside, or near, hospitals, schools and mosques, placing Palestinian civilian lives at risk and complicating efforts to respond to Hamas-directed violence.
Elsewhere, social media users shared false information that Israeli forces had launched an invasion of Gaza and a warning that Palestinian militants were preparing to rampage through Israeli suburbs. These, in turn, further inflamed Palestinians already reeling from anger at evictions and later the missile attacks directed at Hamas in civilian areas of Gaza.
The hysterical celebration by Israeli far rightists when they incorrectly believed a mosque was burning was blasted throughout social media.
Driven by social media’s unique ability to confirm and exaggerate any bias, the result was stunning: masses of far-right Israelis and Palestinian civilians taking to the streets to battle one another. The violence pitted neighbor vs. neighbor and was outside the control of any officials. The communal violence has fueled further social media outrage and calls for retribution that have drowned out voices of moderation.
“A lot of it is rumor and broken telephone, but it is being shared right now because people are desperate to share information about the unfolding situation,” said Arieh Kovler, a Jerusalem-based political analyst and researcher who studies misinformation, to the Times. “What makes it more confusing is that it is a mix of false claims and genuine stuff, which is being attributed to the wrong place or the wrong time.”
But regardless of what form it takes, the misinformation inevitably has a louder volume than actual information, and the result is heightening tensions and fueling both the Israel-Hamas conflict and the communal violence raging through Israeli cities.
Reporters have uncovered numerous postings of false or misleading information on Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp and elsewhere.
Social media’s unique ability to amplify crises — fomenting hysteria, whether for a new consumer product or a political cause — showed its ugly face constantly in the U.S. in recent years, right down to attacking democracy itself via lies about the election, leading to the violent aftermath at the Capitol.
Nor is this a new phenomenon. Recall the central role that social media played in transforming the Arab Spring from a series of anti-government protests to an uncontrollable regional uprising that spawned such large-scale conflicts as the Syrian and Libyan civil wars.
By organizing and targeting information based on hash tags and monitored user behavior, social media provides a dangerous weapon to people who would drive a society mad. If you casually look at one conspiracy theory, or one outrageous act of violence, the platforms in short order bury you with incitement by presenting a stream of other posts in a similar theme. It’s a highly focused approach that is corrosive to rational thought, testing ideas against reality and, ultimately, at war with truth, decency and social order.
Social media apps are spectacular tools to incite mob violence and cement social hatreds.
They raise the specter of creating more conflicts that spin out of the control of state actors, leading to widespread suffering and cruelty. Look at just one offshoot of the Arab Spring — the horrific violence in Yemen, where there have been 233,000 deaths, including 131,000 from starvation, lack of health services and other deprivations.
In Israel, diplomatic efforts have ramped up to broker a cease-fire, with the United Nations Security Council meeting Sunday to discuss the crisis. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, in his opening remarks, described the violence as “appalling” and said it had wrought immense suffering and “unconscionable death.”
“Fighting must stop. It must stop immediately,” he said.
The same goes for the communal violence and the misinformation that is helping spawn it. It’s tearing Israel apart, and threatening to turn into something far worse.
