Thursday, December 21, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
He is obviously not an Israeli.
So a little research showed that there really was a video - but it wasn't of an IDF soldier. It was created by a "motivational speaker" named Chris Jones on TikTok a month ago who makes videos from his car. His "facts" are made up. (He also says witchcraft is real.)
Someone took his video, cropped it to only his face, and put it on TikTok claiming he was an IDF soldier and now it is going viral among equally stupid people dying to find anything that supports the Hamas narrative outside of Hamas itself. Others are copying it and adding their own lies.
This is only one example of thousands. On TikTok, on X, on Instagram, thousands of people share complete garbage that their audiences want to hear. Real videos and photos are miscaptioned, or fake ones are made from other wars. Al Jazeera in particular is making things up that get repeated by the world, including the UN, including American Muslim leaders - CAIR publishes all of these lies without any hesitation.
Yes, Israel needs to do a better job in countering these lies. Even though the people who spread them will never believe it, there needs to be a database where the lies can be looked up and exposed. there are simply too many of them, but one can see which ones are spreading the fastest and prioritize those. Perhaps more importantly, the sources for the more reasonable sounding lies (like the Gaza health ministry or Al Jazeera itself) often also spread lies that no one believes, and it would be worthwhile to pro-actively discredit these sources ahead of time.
Israel has a job to do and cannot let itself get distracted. But the war is also one of perception, and it needs to prioritize the cognitive war even more than it has been.
