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Minutes before I started writing this post, the military wing of Hamas, the Gaza Strip’s ruling political party, flaunted a video of a captured Israeli drone on Twitter. This was part of an ongoing propaganda campaign that seems unique in this brave new digital world: military and paramilitary groups were tweeting PR about (what is surely at this point) a war in real time.
Those jabs from across the world’s most contentious wall drew lots of commentary, much of it on the pit-bull aggressive posts by @IDFSpokesperson. This is a new wrinkle on military propaganda because its reach is limitless—what an illustration of globalized war—and it’s a chilling addition to the on-the-ground war reports that Twitter’s been heralded for. These accounts aren’t the inconsequential mutterings of out-of-the-way armies, either; as Buzzfeed’s John Herrman says, “at least in the information war, tens of thousands of nearly instantaneous enlistments is significant.” That Zionist you know won’t refrain from hitting the retweet button; your friend who compares Palestine to apartheid can now bombard you with newfound and disturbing (and possibly faked) videos of a one-sided war’s gruesome collateral.
