October 7 conspiracies spreading in U.S. - report
Israel behind the October 7 massacres, IDF kidnapping the hostages and other conspiracy theories on the Israel-Hamas war are gaining popularity online
Disinformation campaigns have accompanied the Israel-Hamas war from its very beginning and have spread far outside the Middle East. In the United States, conspiracy theories around the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel are on the rise, reported on Monday The Washington Post.
For one, the October 7 deniers claim that it was the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) who massacred the southern Israeli communities. The "ambush" is said to have been staged by the Israeli authorities to justify the ground operation in the Gaza Strip.
"Hashtags linking Israel to “false flag” - a staged event that casts blame on another party - tripled on services including TikTok, Reddit and 4chan in the weeks after the attacks," said the report citing the Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonprofit tracking disinformation.
"So basically the Hamas attack was a false flag for Israel to occupy Gaza and kill Palestinians," reads a recent post on the Reddit forum r/LateStageCapitalism, cited by The Washington Post. “Expected behaviour from nazi wannabes.”
Another claim suggests that 136 Hamas hostages, many of whom remain in captivity in Gaza, were in fact kidnapped by the Israeli military.
On top of that, the October 7 deniers claim that the U.S. orchestrated the scheme, reported The Washington Post.
As the report points out, such narratives spill from the Internet into the real world, with people justifying vandalism of the Hamas hostages posters from London to Chicago.
“There’s a built-in audience that wants to deny that Jews are the victims of atrocity and furthers the notion that Jews are secretly behind everything,” Joel Finkelstein, chief science officer at NCRI, told The Washington Post.
Disinformation appears to be a challenge within Israel too. Earlier on Friday, a Haaretz investigation exposed such a campaign, orchestrated by an Egyptian expatriate affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
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