Israel's Online Front Collapses
Israel is facing a disaster. The war on the online front has collapsed. Here's what happened and what comes next.
The networked tribal war between pro-Israel and anti-Israel is being fought on two separate fronts.
The traditional media front. TV and Radio networks, both US domestic and global.
The network front. TikTok, X, etc. (Reddit, Instagram, Facebook).
The online front is far more critical than the traditional media front. It’s the center of gravity for this war.
NOTE: In the US, over 85% of the audience getting news directly from traditional media is over 55. In contrast, most people under fifty get almost all their news online. A viral anti-Israel post can get 100 to 200x the number of under 55 viewers of a traditional news broadcast.
The Traditional Media Front
On the traditional media front, the war initially went as expected for Israel.
Most of the coverage, at least in the US, was in support of Israel, particularly with the moral advantage gained by the terror attack and the partial information blackout restricting information flow out of Gaza (disconnection + moral suasion in the newsroom limited the coverage).
Additionally, some early ‘grassroots’ marketing efforts to paint the enemy tribe as pro-Hamas gained a bit of traction as it capitalized on the chaotic messaging during the early phases (it hadn’t settled on anti-Israel as its goal yet).
However, as the war progressed, the coverage on the traditional media front started to erode due to pressure from the online front. The online front was collapsing as the anti-Israel tribe started to grow, and as it grew, it began to shape the coverage seen in the traditional major media. In this information environment, online information flow is upstream of the information flow provided by the conventional media.
The Network Front
On TikTok and X, in particular, the anti-Israel tribe made devastating progress. On these platforms, the anti-Israel tribal network proliferated, generating ten to a hundred times more views and support than the pro-Israel tribal network for the following reasons: