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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, who writes about politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Imagine the 1940s with smartphones.
Hitler could have streamed the suffering of German civilians into every pocket. Footage of the firebombing of Dresden, where tens of thousands died in a single night, would have gone viral under #AllEyesOnDresden.
World War II would have handed the Axis endless material. Civilian losses ran into the millions in Germany, far eclipsing the tens of thousands in Britain and just a few thousand in the United States.
Nazi propagandists could have rallied global opinion to halt Allied bombing, even as Hitler pushed his true aim: German dominance at any cost. In Mein Kampf, he wrote that propaganda needed no truth, only repetition until it sounded true.
Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, called propaganda a weapon with no limit on range. With smartphones, he could have recast Germany as the victim, flooding feeds with images of rubble and bodies.
And we know this was their instinct: At Nuremberg, Nazi defendants insisted their violence was mere self-defence, a response to civilian deaths. The tribunal dismissed it as propaganda, but imagine that excuse amplified on smartphones, absorbed by audiences with little grasp of wartime deception. Repeated endlessly, it could have turned perpetrators into victims and the Allies into butchers.
Japan could have broadcast the Tokyo firebombing, where over 100,000 died in a single night, stripped of context to recast itself as the victim of American cruelty. If Winston Churchill had faced TikTok edits of the Blitz, Britain might have folded.
That may sound far-fetched, but today’s front lines aren’t just in Gaza, Ukraine, or Tehran. They’re on our phones.
For the first time, ordinary people are watching war unfold in real time, shocked to see what war has always been: brutal, messy, and filled with civilian deaths, mistakes, and atrocities. But algorithms don’t show us everything. Deadlier conflicts in Ethiopia, Sudan, or Yemen are absent from our feeds. What’s unique about Gaza is not the war, but how easily we can watch it.
Hamas never expects to win on the battlefield; it invites defeat, knowing the destruction will live on in images long after the fighting ends. Its goal is survival, and media is the weapon that makes that possible. As John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point, noted:
“Non-state actors and great powers may use urban warfare and media manipulation to turn the population of their opponents against them, forcing their governments to make concessions.”1
Hamas, like Nazi Germany, began with expansionist, genocidal ambitions. Its patron, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has been vowing Israel’s annihilation since 1979. The difference today is that social media can invert reality, turning a flood of civilian suffering into the story itself, stripped of context and recast as proof that perpetrators are victims.
Modern jihadists and authoritarian regimes know they cannot outgun Western militaries, but they can outplay them online. Images of shattered homes and bodies pulled from rubble spread faster and cut deeper than any policy paper. Civilian suffering is not collateral damage; it is the strategy.
Think about the danger of this: amplifying your own civilian suffering to win a war. By indulging it, we reward it. We fail future generations by letting this diabolical strategy take root. Every “pro-Palestine” rally or op-ed on Israel that refuses to name Hamas’ tactics helps perpetuate them.
The strategy works because all blame is dumped on Israel, while Hamas disappears from the picture. Strip away the perpetrator and leave only the aftermath, and repetition does the rest. The story becomes not “a terrorist group hides behind civilians” but “Israel slaughters children.”
Psychologists call this the illusory truth effect: Repeat an image or claim often enough, and it feels true. On social media, the same clip of rubble or a bloodied child can surface millions of times a day. Accusations of war crimes, genocide, and famine repeat until they harden into “truth.” Hamas has perfected this, and instead of rejecting it as manipulation, the world has swallowed it whole.
Our open press and unregulated platforms allow Instagram and TikTok to feed propaganda to teenagers thousands of miles away. What once took years of censorship and indoctrination can now be achieved through weaponised social media.
Russia has turned this into a fine art. From troll farms in St. Petersburg to bot networks flooding Twitter with coordinated talking points, the Kremlin understands that confusion is a weapon. RAND (a global policy think tank, research institute, and public sector consulting firm) called it a “firehose of falsehood”2 — high-volume, rapid, multichannel disinformation that leaves audiences too exhausted to resist. The aim is not persuasion but paralysis. Flood the zone with lies, and people stop believing anything.
For all the cybersecurity sleuths hunting hidden signals, the truth is overt. The Islamic Republic of Iran weaponises social media abroad through sock-puppet networks pushing regime narratives in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Its cyber units seed antisemitic content into diasporas, laundering it through Western activist accounts.
By the time a meme lands on Instagram, its origin is forgotten. It looks grassroots, even humanitarian, but it is war propaganda. The Ayatollah chants “Death to the West.” The Houthis print “Death to America” on their flag. Nothing subtle. Nothing covert. Yet through our Eurocentric bigotry, we refuse to give them the dignity of taking them at their word.
The danger is not just that these states produce lies; it is that Western citizens eagerly repeat them, convinced they are on the side of “justice.” The propaganda machine no longer needs to drop leaflets over enemy lines. It relies on well-intentioned influencers doing the job for free. Politicians feel pressure to answer not to facts on the ground, but to viral clips whipping their populations into a frenzy.
In the past, wartime decisions were made by governments and militaries, and the public learned of them later through newspapers or radio. That had its flaws, but it also meant people absorbed a common set of facts and faced the conflict together. Today, the loudest voices are not generals or journalists, but celebrities and influencers with platforms — most of whom know nothing about war crimes, military strategy, or international diplomacy. They react to whatever surfaces in their feeds and then blast their half-baked views to millions, swaying public opinion with a force governments once struggled to command.
TikTok in particular has raised alarms in Washington, not just for its content but for its control. A Chinese-owned app with hundreds of millions of Western users offers Beijing extraordinary reach into the minds of our youth. Whatever else one thinks of bans and hearings, the concern is real: Propaganda doesn’t just flow across these platforms, it can be baked into them.
The Soviets tried to erase faith with schools and secret police. Mao used struggle sessions and Red Book slogans. Last century it took an empire to rewire minds. Today it takes only a smartphone. The Kremlin can drop a video, light the match, and watch it explode across millions of feeds. It is as potent as state-run brainwashing.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown how social platforms coincide with rising mental illness and polarisation among the young. A generation raised on endless feeds is marinated in wartime imagery and disinformation with no tools to process it. As scholar Herbert Simon warned, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”3
Children have always been the first targets of propaganda, because they are tomorrow’s voters, soldiers, and leaders. Shape their reality now and you shape the choices of the next generation.
The reason is simple: Platforms are designed for engagement. They reward outrage and promote groupthink. False news spreads about 70 percent faster than truth,4 and TikTok’s algorithm can funnel new users into extremist content in under 40 minutes.5 They are built to be addictive, and the people who design them know it. That is why many Silicon Valley executives delay or strictly limit their own children’s access to the platforms they created.
The rest of us are not so guarded. Teenagers spend nearly half their waking lives in these feeds, which means half their reality is shaped not by family, school, or community, but by whatever the algorithm serves them. We have more information at our fingertips than any generation in history, yet are profoundly ill-equipped to sift truth from manipulation.
In wartime, that dysfunction is priceless. Every decontextualised clip feeds the swarm. Once something goes viral, it hardens into narrative. Try correcting it and you will be shouted down as complicit.
Propaganda itself is not new. Every war has had it. The difference now is scale and speed. In World War II, Nazi disinformation moved by radio waves and film reels. Social media trains us to form tribes around what we hate, to curate feeds as moral battlefields. “Look at this dead child” is not an argument; it’s an emotional weapon. Share it and you are righteous. Question it and you are a monster.
Authoritarian regimes understand this better than we do. Their victories are not fought on battlefields but forged in algorithms. If social media had existed in the 1940s, Germany might have won. Not with tanks, but with propaganda that drowned Churchill’s speeches in horror. That nightmare never came to pass because the technology did not exist. But it does now. We live in the hyper-digital age of instant Wi-Fi and AI.
Tomorrow’s evidence could clear many of the charges, but the damage is done. The internet will supply ready-made reels insisting that anything positive about Israel is propaganda. Once antisemitism is set in motion, it rarely stops on its own. History suggests the outlook is bleak.
And there is an irony worth pausing on. The freedom we enjoy today, including the ability to post and consume anything we want online, was secured in a war the Allies only won because their enemies lacked the media power we now take for granted. That same freedom, our open information space, is being weaponised to attack the very liberties it once protected.
In an attention economy, the most horrific image wins. The most powerful weapon of the 21st century is not the bomb or the tank, but the algorithm. Yet algorithms are built by people, and people can resist them.
John Spencer, “Urban Warfare, Civilian Casualty, & Human Shields,” Ep. 454, June 11, 2024.
Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It, RAND Corporation, July 11, 2016.
Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” 1971, p. 40
Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, “The spread of true and false news online,” Science, March 2018.
Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz, and Deepa Seetharaman, “Inside TikTok’s Algorithm: A WSJ Investigation,” July 21, 2021.
It's the evil coalition of social media and indoctrination on the college campuses that is capable of shifting support from the true victim to the fraudulent claims of the perpetrator. That coalition is united in its evil and irrational support of Hamas. That coalition is funded by Qatar and by China.
The first obligation is to win on the battlefield. If you kill enough of the enemy, they will stop fighting. The winner of the military conflict gets to write the history books. Jews should stop worrying about being loved. Just imagine how much worse it would be if Israel lost the war. There would have been no aid if the roles were reversed.