An Uncomfortable Question
There’s an image that has defined these past few years in Europe: packed squares, occupied universities, tent camps on campuses, marches, Palestinian flags, the same slogans chanted from Berlin to Paris, from London to Brussels. And, above all, an almost unbroken digital stream. After Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023 — the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust — and the war that followed, for millions of young people Gaza stopped being a distant conflict. It became a political, moral and identity cause. A mobilisation that was, in large part, real — often generous, fuelled by outrage over the suffering of Palestinian civilians and the conviction of witnessing an injustice too great to ignore.
This piece isn’t meant to judge that choice, or to settle who is right in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The author has his own views, but they hardly matter here. This piece asks a different, colder, perhaps more uncomfortable question: was a mobilisation of this scale, duration and intensity entirely organic? Or is it possible that a movement born of genuine motives was spotted, amplified and partly radicalised by foreign actors interested not so much in Palestine as in the divisions it could open up in Western societies — with Israel increasingly reduced to a simplified target for an anger that, by now, has less and less to do with Gaza?
We have no proof that Moscow, Tehran or Beijing “created” Europe’s pro-Palestine movements. We don’t know whether a single hand is behind it, or what share of the mobilisation would have existed anyway. There’s no smoking gun. But we now have solid evidence of something else: foreign powers have deliberately used the war in Gaza as raw material for influence operations, disinformation and polarisation. In some cases they built networks of accounts, ad campaigns and fake websites. In others they seeded provocations into public debate. In Germany, an outfit tied to Russia’s propaganda ecosystem went as far as coordinating with university occupiers during an anti-Israel protest, helping spread Hamas symbols in the process.[8]
So the question isn’t whether interference exists — it does, and it’s documented. The question is how much it mattered.
The Gaza Anomaly: Attention, Mobilisation, Persistence
Before talking about interference, the starting hunch needs checking: is Gaza really exceptional? The answer is yes — with a caveat. It isn’t true that Ukraine failed to produce a huge popular mobilisation. In the nine days after Russia’s invasion in February 2022, ACLED — an NGO that specialises in exactly this kind of data — recorded more than 1,800 demonstrations against the war and in solidarity with Ukraine, in at least 93 countries and territories.[2] It was an impressive global wave.
What sets Gaza apart is persistence. Still according to ACLED, more than 51,000 pro-Palestine demonstrations were held worldwide between October 2023 and the end of 2025 — about 18,000 in 2025 alone, across 104 countries and territories.[1] Two years into the war, the cause was still generating mobilisation on a planetary scale. On campuses, in activist networks and on social media, it had become part of a generational political language — one that, as we’ll see, sometimes slid into openly antisemitic episodes.
The comparison with Sudan reveals a first factor — and a genuinely startling one, since most readers have little sense of the war's scale. Sudan has been tearing itself apart since April 2023, when the regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces turned on each other. ACLED has tracked more than 58,000 reported fatalities since the war began, but independent epidemiological modelling — including a study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine that found more than 60,000 deaths in Khartoum state alone in the war's first 14 months — suggests the real toll is far higher than what gets reported; overall estimates range from roughly 150,000 to 400,000 dead. Against that backdrop, a Media@LSE working paper, analysing 87 major international outlets over comparable periods, estimates roughly 32,000 articles on the Israeli-Palestinian war against about 3,400 on the conflict in Sudan.[4] Here the imbalance in attention starts upstream: Gaza was vastly more visible across the global media system than a war that, by any human measure, was worse.
But the comparison with Ukraine tells a more interesting story. A study published in 2026 in New Media & Society analysed 94,184 Facebook posts published between February 25 and April 2, 2024 by 51 major media organisations in 24 European countries. With a single exception, Ireland, every country gave more coverage to Ukraine than to Gaza; in most cases the ratio was roughly two to one, and in countries closer to the Ukrainian front it reached at least five to one.[3]
That figure doesn’t prove foreign interference. It does prove that a simple explanation won’t do. At least in that phase, it’s hard to argue that Gaza dominated European activism simply because traditional media covered it more than Ukraine: often the opposite was true. The extraordinary political and digital energy built around Gaza had other sources. Some were clearly organic: the emotional force of the images, identification with civilians, diaspora networks, campus political culture, younger generations’ relationship with colonialism and Western institutions. But that very capacity for mobilisation made Gaza — and, by extension, Israel — an ideal target for anyone looking for a fault line to exploit in Europe’s democracies.
Social Media Doesn’t Explain Everything
The easiest temptation is to blame the imbalance on social media. TikTok gets the most attention here simply because it’s the platform researchers have studied most closely — but, as the data below shows, the same pattern holds across every major platform, and everywhere it urges caution.
Laura Edelson, a researcher at Northeastern University, used the TikTok Research API to analyse more than 280,000 posts published in the United States across twelve time windows between October 2023 and January 2024. Posts classified as pro-Palestine numbered 170,430; pro-Israel posts, just 8,843 — a ratio of nearly twenty to one. Views ran to roughly 236 million and 14 million respectively.[5] Two years later, in September 2025, the same research still found about 17 pro-Palestine posts for every pro-Israel one.[6] The imbalance has proven remarkably persistent — and so has the marginality to which pro-Israel voices, including those of hostage families, have been confined.
The imbalance isn’t confined to TikTok, though. Public data cited by the platform itself in November 2023 showed roughly 5.7 million Instagram posts tagged #FreePalestine against 214,000 tagged #StandWithIsrael; on Facebook, about 11 million against 278,000.[16] These are cumulative hashtag counts, not an opinion poll, and not a clean measure of content posted only after October 7. But as an indicator of the relative scale of the two digital ecosystems, the gap remains striking: roughly 27 to 1 on Instagram and nearly 40 to 1 on Facebook. It’s worth noting that TikTok itself, in the same statement these numbers come from, relativises them: alongside the hashtag counts, the platform cites an Echelon Insights poll from October 26, 2023, according to which 33% of US TikTok users under 40 identified as pro-Israel against 28% pro-Palestinian — a reminder that the volume of content published doesn’t necessarily match the real leanings of the audience consuming it.[16]
Another study lets us see not just a snapshot but how things evolved over time. A peer-reviewed study of 1.3 million posts on Bluesky shows that in October 2023 pro-Israel voices were still slightly ahead, 33.01% against 28.99%. In the following months the ratio steadily reversed: by January 2024, pro-Palestine content had already overtaken pro-Israel content, reaching 39% of messages against 20.74% — a lead the rest of the dataset, which runs through May 2024, would go on to confirm.[17]
An analysis by the Pew Research Center of major American news influencers points the same way. Among accounts with at least 100,000 followers who explicitly stated a position in their profile, pro-Palestine accounts outnumbered pro-Israel ones on TikTok, 9% to 2%; on Instagram, 7 to 3; on Facebook, 6 to 4; and on X, 4 to 3.[18] These are different measures that can’t simply be added together, but they suggest that the asymmetry seen on TikTok belonged to a wider digital ecosystem — one in which the pro-Israel narrative was almost always starting from behind.
But there’s a crucial detail. Edelson found no evidence that TikTok was simply “pushing” pro-Palestine content systematically. In the first study, its trajectory looked more like that of a social movement: gradual growth, consolidation, a peak, then decline. In 2025, moreover, the median view count for individual pro-Israel videos was actually slightly higher, while the large gap in the averages came from the fact that the videos that went genuinely viral were pro-Palestine.[5][6]
This matters because it rules out turning the piece into a single-cause theory: “it’s the algorithm’s fault.” Social media was certainly the environment in which the mobilisation grew, but there’s no evidence it directed it.
This is exactly where the concept of information warfare becomes useful. An influence operation doesn’t need to control TikTok, or persuade millions of people one by one. It needs to get into the stream: seed a piece of content, make it appear in many places at once, amplify a frame, imitate a credible source, use fake accounts to create the impression of an existing consensus. If the topic is powerful enough, the rest of the work can be done by real users — completely unaware, and perfectly sincere.
A Vast, Visual and Contaminated Information Ecosystem
The imbalance in volume doesn’t yet tell us who produced or amplified any given piece of content. But there’s a second factor that helps explain why Gaza became such fertile ground for manipulation — and, it has to be said, so unfavourable to a balanced picture of Israel: the sheer amount of false, recycled or decontextualised visual material that swept across platforms from the war’s first weeks.
In the first month of the conflict alone, an investigation by ProPublica and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism identified more than 2,000 posts on X from verified accounts containing images or video tied to over 200 claims already unambiguously debunked. The posts came from more than 1,300 accounts and had racked up roughly 500 million views combined.[19] That’s not 2,000 distinct fabrications: many posts recycled the same material. And the sample never claimed to be exhaustive. Which is exactly why the figure should be read as a floor for a much larger phenomenon, not a full measure of it.
The nature of that disinformation is even more telling than its volume. BOOM, analysing a hundred widely circulated false claims tied to the war, found that 84% used video and 13% used images; only 3% were text-only. In 56% of cases, old videos were recycled out of context and passed off as footage of the ongoing war — the technique known, tellingly, as “Pallywood.” A further 8% used video-game footage passed off as real, while fully AI-generated images accounted for 4% and deepfakes for 2%.[20]
That finding is confirmed by research published in the Journal of Communication: in the sample of visual disinformation narratives analysed across the wars in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine, outright fabrication or manipulation of images accounted for less than 5%. The dominant form was decontextualisation — authentic photographs and footage from another moment, another place, or even a fictional setting, presented as proof of what was happening.[21]
This is the decisive trait: a vast, visual and contaminated information ecosystem formed around Gaza. The most effective falsehood didn’t have to be built from scratch. It could be the genuine image of a child, a bombing, a body — placed in the wrong war, on the wrong day, or attributed to the wrong author, often, it’s worth noting, in a direction that deepened the perception of Israeli responsibility. None of this proves who originated the content, and none of it proves foreign interference. What it does prove is how easy it was, for anyone with coordinated networks and a strategic interest in polarisation, to step into that stream and steer perception. It’s precisely the kind of environment in which the old technique of active measures becomes enormously more powerful.
The Old Lesson of “Active Measures”
The technique didn’t originate with social media. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union developed what became known as active measures: a set of clandestine operations that included disinformation, forged documents, front organisations, agents of influence and campaigns designed to exploit the political vulnerabilities of rival societies. Historical American documents describe, in explicit terms, a strategy aimed not necessarily at creating movements from nothing, but at exploiting divisions, suspicions and conflicts that already existed.[10][11]
It’s an essential distinction. Effective disinformation doesn’t have to be an outright lie. It can be a true fact placed in a misleading context; a genuine photograph circulated with a false meaning; a real episode selected because it confirms a particular audience’s bias; a marginal voice made artificially huge. A piece published in the CIA’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, reviewing Soviet operations, noted how the KGB exploited journalists and activists who weren’t Moscow’s agents but were predisposed to accept material that seemed to confirm what they already believed.[10]
The advantage is obvious. If a foreign power invents an absurd story, the public can reject it. If instead it identifies a real cause, real suffering and a real conflict, and amplifies only its most divisive aspects, propaganda stops looking like propaganda.
That’s the key to reading Gaza. We shouldn’t picture an office in Moscow dictating the slogans of a march in Brussels. That would be a caricature. We should picture a machine that watches which issues divide a society, which images provoke anger, which accusations delegitimise a government, which content drives generations apart, which fault lines can be inserted into democracies — and that spends resources getting exactly that material to circulate.
Not Pro-Palestine. Pro-Polarisation.
This is the heart of the matter. For a power waging an information war against European democracies, there’s no need to “be pro-Palestine.” What’s needed is to be pro-polarisation.
Russia can exploit, at the very same moment, the fear of antisemitism among French Jews and anti-Israel anger among German students. It can tell one audience that European elites back Israel because they’re cynical and beholden to the United States, and tell another that Europe has descended into chaos because of Muslim immigration. The two messages can be ideologically incompatible and strategically perfectly coherent.
The European External Action Service defines Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, FIMI, as exactly this: the intentional, coordinated and manipulative activity through which foreign actors try to distort the information space. In 2024 the EEAS analysed 505 incidents, involving 38,000 unique channels across at least 25 platforms; in 2025 the incidents recorded rose to 540, with 29% attributed to Russia and 6% to China, while a large share remained formally unattributed.[9] The EEAS describes the overall goal as sowing division, fear and distrust, and weakening the credibility of democratic institutions.
Gaza offers almost everything an operation like this could want: religion, antisemitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, immigration, human rights, universities, free speech, the relationship with the United States, NATO, Ukraine, and the West’s moral credibility. None of these fault lines needs to be invented. They just need to be sharpened.
The Russian Fingerprints: Where the Hypothesis Meets the Facts
The best-documented case is Russia. In October 2024 the Institute for Strategic Dialogue published an analysis of 192 pro-Kremlin Facebook ads targeting French and German audiences between October 7, 2023 and August 30, 2024. The ads combined keywords tied to Ukraine and to Gaza or Palestine, and were linked, by their features and operating methods, to the Doppelgänger ecosystem.[7]
The content is revealing. This wasn’t a simple “pro-Palestine” campaign. The narratives included the false claim that Western weapons meant for Ukraine had ended up in Hamas’s hands, anti-American messaging, attacks on military and humanitarian aid to Kyiv, arguments about immigration and about economic decline in France and Germany. The Middle East conflict was being used as leverage for a different Russian strategic goal: weakening Western support for Ukraine and increasing discord and distrust within European countries. The ads often stayed online for less than a day, but reached an average of more than 6,200 accounts before removal.[7]
The second case is even more instructive. In autumn 2023, Stars of David appeared spray-painted on walls across the Paris region. In a France already shaken by a real spike in antisemitic incidents after October 7, the images carried enormous symbolic weight. VIGINUM, the French agency tasked with detecting foreign digital interference — whose work later fed into the report of the French Senate’s inquiry commission on foreign interference — identified a network of 1,095 fake accounts linked, with a high degree of confidence, to RRN/Doppelgänger. Those accounts published 2,589 posts, artificially amplifying the story’s spread. According to some journalistic accounts, the Russian network began posting the images almost 48 hours ahead of the first authentic post identified on social media — a suggestive detail, but one I haven’t found confirmed in the text of the Senate report itself, and one that should therefore be treated with the caution owed to a not-fully-verified source.[12]
Here the logic of polarisation looks almost flawless. The product of the operation isn’t an opinion about the conflict. It’s social tension. The fear of a France gripped by antisemitism, friction between communities, the sense that coexistence had become impossible. France’s foreign ministry called the episode an opportunistic strategy aimed at exploiting international crises to sow confusion and stoke tension in public debate.[12]
The third case takes us directly inside a mobilisation. In May 2025 the European Union sanctioned AFA Medya, the company running the RED platforms. In its official reasoning, the Council states that RED had close financial and organisational ties to Russian state propaganda entities and systematically spread false information on contentious topics in order to sow ethnic, political and religious discord among its audience, predominantly German. And it adds a specific claim: during the violent occupation of a German university by anti-Israel protesters, RED staff coordinated with the occupiers to spread images of the vandalism through their own channels, including images bearing Hamas symbols, giving the protest an exclusive media platform.[8]
Is this proof of a Russian hand behind the pro-Palestine movement? No. But it is something far more concrete than a generic social media campaign: a structure tied to the Russian propaganda ecosystem inserting itself materially inside an existing mobilisation and helping amplify its most confrontational strand — and one openly sympathetic to Hamas.
Iran: A Genuine Stake, the Same Opportunity
Iran calls for a different discussion. Tehran isn’t a disinterested observer of the conflict: it backs Hamas, Hezbollah and, more broadly, the regional axis built against Israel, whose destruction it openly declares as its goal. It would be wrong, then, to fully equate its position with Russia’s. But that doesn’t stop Iran from also using the war as an opportunity to influence Western public opinion.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence documented a very rapid expansion of Iranian cyber and influence operations after October 7, 2023. The number of monitored Iranian groups active against Israel rose from nine in the first week to fourteen two weeks later; cyber-enabled influence operations, which occurred roughly once every two months in 2021, numbered eleven in October 2023 alone.[13] Microsoft flags an important nuance, though: in the early phase the operations looked reactive, chaotic and opportunistic, and the data offered no evidence of prior coordination with Hamas’s plans. Only later did they grow more sophisticated and widen their targets to include Israel’s political and economic allies.[13]
Google adds another significant piece. In summer 2024 its Threat Analysis Group took down 22 domains linked to a coordinated operation attributed to Iran, spreading content in English, French and Arabic that was favourable to Palestine and critical of Israel. The same operators also published material on the US election, using narratives drawn from across the political spectrum.[14] In the last quarter of that year, Google took down another 27 domains from an Iranian campaign covering the Israel-Palestine conflict, the US military presence in the Middle East, domestic social issues in the United States, and the election — again spanning narratives from different political camps.[15]
It’s precisely this ideological elasticity that matters. Tehran has its own stakes in the conflict, but its influence infrastructure can simultaneously exploit Gaza to weaken Israel’s allies, stoke hostility toward the United States, and sharpen fault lines that already exist in Western societies.
And China? The Suspicion Is Legitimate, the Evidence Is Weaker
China appears regularly in European reports on foreign interference. In 2025 the EEAS directly attributed 6% of the 540 FIMI incidents it analysed to China, and Google continues to take down thousands of channels belonging to coordinated networks tied to the People’s Republic of China.[9] It’s also documented that Chinese ecosystems have used Western protests and controversies to tell a story of liberal democracies’ hypocrisy and decline.
But if the specific question is whether Beijing played a significant role in the explosion of Europe’s pro-Palestine movements, the public evidence is far weaker than for Russia and Iran. Lumping China into the same category without that distinction would weaken this inquiry rather than strengthen it.
What We Know. And, Above All, What We Don’t
At this point it’s worth stopping one step short of the most seductive conclusion. The cases gathered here don’t prove that Europe’s pro-Palestine mobilisation is the product of a foreign operation. They don’t prove that the squares would have stayed empty without Russia or Iran — nor, it should be added, that they would have stayed so lopsided against Israel. They don’t prove that organisers, students, associations, or the millions of users who shared content knew they were taking part in a manipulated ecosystem. They don’t even prove the existence of a single, central hand.
The word “unwitting” is decisive. A person can see images attributed to Gaza — true, false, or simply stripped of context — find them morally intolerable, share them, join a demonstration and devote months to a cause they believe in deeply. All of this can happen in complete good faith. In fact, in the vast majority of cases, it’s reasonable to assume that’s exactly what happened.
But individual good faith tells us nothing about the structure of the information environment surrounding it. The first account to make an image go viral can be fake. A true story can be selected because it produces a political effect. A coordinated network can make a topic look more omnipresent than it would be organically. A site that looks journalistic can be a copy built by Doppelgänger. A physical provocation can be photographed and artificially amplified before the public understands where it came from. A platform tied to state propaganda can insert itself into a university occupation and hand it a megaphone.
This is where the opening question changes shape. We can’t claim that the exceptional growth of the pro-Palestine movement is “caused,” in a strict sense, by foreign interference. But we can claim three things. First: that growth, and especially its persistence, is exceptional and documentable. Second: foreign actors identified Gaza as a useful theme for their influence operations. Third: there are documented cases where those operations deliberately tried to turn the Middle East conflict into an internal fault line within European societies.
What’s missing is a measure of the effect. How much of the mobilisation would have been identical without that amplification? How much content moved from inauthentic networks to authentic users? How many narratives born inside an influence ecosystem later became ordinary political language? Platforms and governments probably hold far more data than what’s currently available to independent researchers. And that is exactly the point on which Europe should be demanding transparency.
The Perfect Operation
For decades we imagined propaganda as a lie a power tries to impose on a public. That image is no longer good enough. Contemporary information warfare can work while inventing almost nothing. It can take a genuine tragedy, a genuine sentiment and a genuine mobilisation, and intervene on their visibility, their pacing, the selection and decontextualisation of images, on interpretations, and on the perception of consensus.
That’s what makes the subject so hard to discuss. Every time foreign interference around Gaza comes up, there’s a risk of delegitimising people who have nothing to do with Russia, Iran or China and who mobilised for sincere humanitarian reasons. But the fear of offending them can’t stop democracies from asking what is happening inside their own information spaces — nor, still less, from recognising that what was at stake was never only Palestine, but Israel’s very legitimacy in the eyes of a public increasingly exposed to a one-directional flood of images and accusations.
The lesson of Soviet active measures was simple: the most useful division is the one that already exists. Contemporary technology has made that infinitely cheaper and more scalable. You don’t need to convince an entire society. You just need to help its angriest factions stop recognising each other.
We may never know how much the extraordinary mobilisation built around Gaza was shaped by these operations. But we know enough to reject two opposite, equally simplistic explanations: that millions of people were remote-controlled by foreign powers, or that the documented interference had no effect at all simply because we can’t measure it.
On this whole affair, everyone is free to keep believing whatever they choose. You can judge the mobilisation to have been largely spontaneous or largely orchestrated from outside; you can weigh differently the responsibility of Moscow, of Tehran, of algorithms, or simply of the genuine outrage of millions of people. But there is one fact that, at this point, is hard to keep arguing about: Israel lost that communications war. Investigating why remains useful — it is, after all, the whole point of this inquiry — but from the standpoint of the result, it’s almost beside the point. And of course not all the blame lies elsewhere: Israel’s narrative defeat also owes something to the choices of Netanyahu’s government, to the statements and initiatives of ministers like Itamar Ben-Gvir — hard to describe with any word milder than “outrageous” — to the images coming out of Gaza and to the excesses that, over two years of war, there have certainly been, to the communication failures of a government that at times seemed not even to have noticed it was fighting on that front too. If this piece proves anything, it’s that the truth, as almost always, is more complicated than either the people crying conspiracy or the people denying one outright would have you believe.
But the consequences of that communications defeat, whatever one makes of them, won’t fade any time soon. We’ll find them in an antisemitism that has returned to Europe at levels that seemed unthinkable only a few years ago. We’ll find them in national policies increasingly unwilling to hear Israel’s case, in a young public that now associates Israel almost automatically with the wrong side of history. The first real test — and perhaps the only possible turning point — comes on October 27, when Israelis go back to the polls to elect a new Parliament. Until then, the battle over the narrative stays open. The battle over reality, unfortunately for Israel, has been over for a while.
Main Sources and References
The sources gathered here are for fact-checking and for the editorial process that follows. Numbered references in the text point to this list.
[1] ACLED, What’s driving conflict today? A review of global trends (2025): more than 51,000 pro-Palestine demonstrations since October 2023, 18,000 of them in 2025, across 104 countries and territories. Source
[2] ACLED, Fact Sheet: Global Demonstrations Against the Russian Invasion of Ukraine: more than 1,800 demonstrations between February 24 and March 4, 2022 in at least 93 countries and territories. Source
[3] Delia Dumitrescu, New Media & Society (2026), How does war look like on the European mainstream media Facebook? Analysis of 94,184 posts from 51 outlets across 24 European countries. Source
[4] Media@LSE Working Paper #74, Major International Issues Undercovered By the News Media: estimates roughly 32,000 articles on Gaza against about 3,400 on Sudan over comparable periods. Source
[5] Northeastern University (2024), Laura Edelson’s research on more than 280,000 TikTok posts: 170,430 pro-Palestine against 8,843 pro-Israel, and 236 million against 14 million views. Source
[6] Northeastern University (2025), update to the TikTok research: about 17 pro-Palestine posts for every pro-Israel post as of September 2025. Source
[7] Institute for Strategic Dialogue (2024), How a pro-Kremlin ad campaign used the Israel-Hamas conflict to spread propaganda in France and Germany: 192 Facebook ads likely linked to Doppelgänger. Source
[8] Council of the European Union, Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/965 and accompanying reasoning: AFA Medya/RED, ties to Russian propaganda and an alleged coordination with occupiers during an anti-Israel protest at a German university — an accusation disputed by the party concerned; a German prosecutor’s office reportedly found no evidence of false factual statements on the matter (source: investigation by Matthias Monroy, digit.site36.net, March 2026). Source
[9] EEAS, 3rd Report on FIMI Threats (2025) and 4th Report on FIMI Threats (2026): 505 incidents in 2024; 540 in 2025, 29% attributed to Russia and 6% to China. Source
[10] CIA, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 64 No. 1 (2020), a review by Thomas Rid, Active Measures (alongside Richard Stengel’s Information Wars): a historical account of Soviet disinformation techniques and the exploitation of pre-existing biases, suspicions and political fault lines. Source
[11] U.S. Department of State, historical documents on Soviet active measures (including Soviet Influence Activities: A Report on Active Measures and Propaganda, 1986-87): propaganda, disinformation, forgeries, agents of influence and the exploitation of foreign countries’ internal vulnerabilities. Source
[12] VIGINUM, whose findings fed into the report of the French Senate’s inquiry commission on foreign interference (2024): 1,095 accounts and 2,589 posts linked to the Paris Stars of David; attribution to RRN/Doppelgänger with a high degree of confidence. The detail of the “48-hour head start” comes from journalistic accounts, not from the text of the Senate report directly consulted. Source
[13] Microsoft Threat Intelligence (2024), Iran accelerates cyber ops against Israel from chaotic start: the growth of Iranian cyber and influence operations after October 7. Source
[14] Google Threat Analysis Group, TAG Bulletin Q3 2024: 22 domains linked to Iran, with content in English, French and Arabic favourable to Palestine and critical of Israel. Source
[15] Google Threat Analysis Group, TAG Bulletin Q4 2024: 27 domains linked to Iran on Israel-Palestine, the US military presence, domestic social issues and the American election. Source
[16] TikTok Newsroom (2023), The truth about TikTok hashtags and content during the Israel-Hamas war: public data cited for Instagram and Facebook, with 5.7 million #FreePalestine posts against 214,000 #StandWithIsrael on Instagram and 11 million against 278,000 on Facebook; the same statement also cites an Echelon Insights poll (October 26, 2023) showing 33% of US TikTok users under 40 pro-Israel against 28% pro-Palestine. Source
[17] PLOS ONE, Bluesky: Network topology, polarization, and algorithmic curation: dataset of 1.3 million posts (July 2023 – May 2024); a progressive overtake by pro-Palestine positions, reaching 39% against 20.74% pro-Israel by January 2024. Source
[18] Pew Research Center (2024), America’s News Influencers: analysis of 500 major news influencers across platforms; in their profiles, pro-Palestine positions were more common than pro-Israel ones on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X. Source
[19] ProPublica & Tow Center for Digital Journalism (2023), How Verified Accounts on X Thrive While Spreading Misinformation About the Israel-Hamas Conflict: more than 2,000 posts with already-debunked images or video, over 200 false narratives, more than 1,300 verified accounts and roughly 500 million impressions in the first month. Source
[20] BOOM (2023), Pallywood, Deepfakes, X Verified Users, Graphic Violence Breed Disinfo On Israel-Palestine: of 100 false claims analysed, 84% video, 13% images, 56% old videos out of context; 4% AI images and 2% deepfakes. Source
[21] Journal of Communication (2025), The visual nature of information warfare: in the visual disinformation analysed, fabrication/manipulation accounted for less than 5%; decontextualisation of authentic material dominated. Source
