The recent flare-up between the Israelis and Palestinians, centered in Gaza, is playing out on a whole other battle field: Twitter.
The Daily Beast has been chronicling the battle of public opinion, describing aggressive Twitter assaults by both Israeli officials and citizenry, and Palestinian officials and citizenry. The article refers to a tweet by the Israeli Defense Force which was targeted at Hamas sympathizing twitter users:"We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead,” to which Hamas tweeted a direct reply.
Forbes opined: "This may be the first war declared via Twitter."
Since the flare-up began, hashtags supporting both sides have exploded in number, making their ways into the tweets of celebrities, political personalities, and hundreds of thousands of average twitter users.
Now-- I don't intend for this post to become part of the online cacophony of voices, opinions, and chronicles, rather, I think its interesting to explore the extent to which social media is (and will be) used to disseminate information and form public opinion as conflicts play out.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/17/israel-and-gaza-battle-twitter-war-over-rocket-attacks.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/11/14/is-hamas-winning-the-twitter-war/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/11/14/israel-live-blogs-and-tweets-attack-on-hamas-uploads-killing-to-youtube/
Interesting to see how even Kim Kardashian got in trouble when she used her Twitter account to comment on the hostilities:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.timesofisrael.com/kim-kardashian-and-her-pro-israel-tweet/