Disinformation has flourished on a number of online platforms in the month since the start of Hamas’s bloody attack on Israel, fueled by lax content rules on X, formerly Twitter and Telegram, and sometimes supported by state actors, according to an analysis by Britain’s The Guardian, cited by News.ro.

Widespread fake news and false claims are particularly associated with attempts to downplay the horror of the October 7 cross-border attack by Hamas, as well as with claims that Palestinians, already heavily bombarded, are faking scenes of violence.

Jackson Hinkle, a 22-year-old American far-right influencer with 2 million followers on X who calls himself a “MAGA Communist,” claimed in late October, without evidence, that Hamas fighters had shot more than 100 people, most of them armed settlers.

In fact, the death toll is estimated at 1,200, and they were killed inside Israel’s borders, so they could not have been settlers.

But that was just one of Hinkle’s lies. In the same post on October 28, he claimed that half of the Israelis killed in the Hamas attack were soldiers, many of them killed “in tank bombardments.”

Jackson Hinkle has been banned from YouTube and Instagram

Hinkle, who was once a youth supporter of left-wing Democrat Bernie Sanders, was banned from YouTube and Instagram for spreading misinformation, but thrives on X, where his post denying the reality of the Oct. 7 attack has 5.1 million views.

The influencer cited the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as the source, though the post has a rebuttal to the publication. In a message with 2.5 million views – half of the original tweet – the newspaper said: “The post in this photo contains an outright lie about the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. This has no basis in Haaretz reporting then or since.”

Hinkle’s recent tweets include a photo of him holding a “Putin is good” poster and a photo accusing the BBC of promoting “Zionist propaganda”. His agenda is blatantly anti-Semitic.

Other posts are patently false: His claim on Telegram that “Yemen has announced that it is now at war with Israel” is patently false (the Houthi rebels who fired missiles at Israel are not the country’s government).

That didn’t stop Hinkle from appearing on RT, a Russian propaganda outlet, as a “political analyst,” giving an interview in which he accused Israel of trying to force the entire Palestinian population out of Gaza. He also hinted that the US Marines could be involved in a “very big war”.

“Pallywood” posts are getting more and more prominent

Pippa Allen-Kinross, news editor at fact-checking website Full Fact, said that after more than a month of conflict in Israel and Gaza, disinformation narratives were evolving and pointed to the growing visibility of “Pallywood” publications – claims that the Palestinians are fake videos to show suffering and pain.

At the beginning of the conflict, on October 13, the official Israeli government account on X posted a video of a child being taken to a hospital, alongside another image of a lifeless child wrapped in a cloth.

“Hamas released a false video of a doll (yes, a doll) suggesting she was among the victims of an IDF attack,” said the since-deleted post, which has been viewed at least 1.2 million times.

The post was prompted by similar statements by Israeli activists online, as well as on other official accounts. The Israeli embassies in France and Austria quickly followed suit, the latter calling it “fake news in the style of Pallywood”, and the publication was widely circulated.

But upon verification, the story turned out to be the original tape and video of Omar Bilal al-Banna, a four-year-old boy killed in Gaza City.

Journalists contacted photographer and filmmaker Momen El Halabi, who said that a child had been killed and that the body was not a doll, a story confirmed by family members.

Other pictures taken by El-Halabi and another photographer at the scene show two men, relatives of the boy who died, carefully holding the body, wrapped in such a way that it could not be a doll.

On the other hand, a video deleted from Facebook but still available on X shows a row of corpses covered in white shrouds and mocks them for still moving, which means they are not dead. Arabic text on the Facebook video accused Hamas of being “the master of fake news,” but in fact, Full Fact notes, the footage is “actually from a 2013 student protest in Cairo, Egypt.”

Why is there more fake news about the Middle East conflict than about the war in Ukraine

Adam Hadley, founder of Technology against Terrorism, says the current situation is exacerbated – and likely to continue – due to the intensity of the conflict.

“It’s an information war as intense as a war on the ground, but perhaps more pronounced than a conflict like the Ukrainian one, because of the polarization we’re seeing,” he explained.

Others, such as Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative journalism site Bellingcat, blame X. X’s reduction in content moderation and the introduction of a blue-tick payment system that allows users to receive preferences from the social network’s algorithm are among the factors contributing to the misinformation. “I certainly believe that the changes that Elon Musk (the owner of X) has made have created an environment conducive to the spread of misinformation,” Higgins said.

Hadley also focuses on monitoring Telegram, where many candid videos by and about Hamas appear.

Last month, Pavlo Durov, Telegram’s chief executive, said he would not ban the Hamas channel, but later partially retracted his comment. Since the beginning of this month, users who download Telegram through Apple or Google can no longer see the channel of Hamas or its military wing.

Higgins stated that he believed that state actors had only limited influence on the phenomenon, arguing instead that the online environment encouraged cynical behavior.

“The situation is mostly driven by individuals and fraudsters with their own agendas, in part because anyone on X can now have a verified account. Most of the time, people don’t make any real attempt to find out the truth, they just want a point of view to beat others over the head with,” explained the founder of Bellingcat.