Israel war: When disinformation replaced propaganda
Jay Heisler
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By the time I became interested in the study of propaganda, it had fallen out of vogue. During the Cold War, it was normal for experts to study propaganda as a field of academic thought. After the Cold War ended, this very gradually faded into the dustbin of academic history.
Academics now love dismissing concepts in the dictionary for having definitions that they claim are unclear, and “propaganda” as a term was on the chopping block.
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First, in our culture, it has become increasingly impossible to refer objectively to one’s own work as propaganda. That is seen as having negative connotations, so the label is rejected. During my activist youth, it was normal for us to refer to our literature as propaganda affectionately, which allowed for a vibrant debate over its contents. Those days are six feet in the ground.
Second, the term has been retired in favor of the preferred term, disinformation, which is seen as more accurate and more applicable in the age of social media and artificial intelligence.
For the most part, the study of disinformation has entirely replaced the study of propaganda. I believe that with the retiring of propaganda as a field of study, self-reflection and nuance have been retired, too. The very language of dissent within your own ideology or movement has been erased.
Now, instead of offering feedback on the propaganda of your side, you have two stark choices: Either accept your side’s political output as ironclad truth above scrutiny or improvement or use the concept of disinformation to refer to your own side’s output, something more or less impossible to do in any political climate, let alone this political climate. What you are not able to call disinformation has to be accepted as true.
Furthermore, the supposedly scientific replacement concept of disinformation is quite open for abuse.
During the Israel-Hamas war, the media have widely publicized the rampant disinformation problem coming out of both sides of the war. However, I make a mental note every time a journalist fails to acknowledge that many of the videos circulating are true and verified. Journalists have no business trying to frame it like the next video you see can be dismissed as false when you can easily verify it yourself.
I do not like making “both sides” arguments when it comes to war crimes. I am half ethnically Jewish, and I have reported for Lebanese media out of the West Bank, so for the sake of my career, I aim not to show equivalency between the two sides but to make a crucial argument where my political sympathies are beside the point.
Thanks in part to journalists rightfully pointing out the disinformation problem but failing to establish that much of the footage is, in fact, true, it has become normal for both sides of the Israel-Hamas war to post comments under each other’s real war crimes evidence on social media to say things such as “Source?!” and “Prove it!”
The language of disinformation, the supposedly more academic conflict, has actually found itself considerably easier to abuse as a disinformation tool itself because anti-disinformation sentiment can be used quite commonly to dismiss real and easily verified evidence.
The best two examples I can provide from either side are, first, Hamas violence against women hostages, including in a video verified by the Washington Post (if you must know my personal politics, I am a Washington Post subscriber).
Second, a Human Rights Watch report that Israel is using white phosphorous gas in its retaliation.
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I have seen both the fact that Hamas is using violence against women as a weapon of war against women hostages and the fact that Israel is using white phosphorous gas as a weapon of war called into doubt quite regularly by supporters of the side being accused. Were I right now to take to X, formerly Twitter, to post either of the above accusations, I would be met with claims of disinformation by the other side.
Disinformation, while supposedly the more academic concept, has, by replacing propaganda, entirely replaced the ability to see your own side as anything other than divine truth. It is obvious that disinformation as a field of study as it exists now is failing all of us. Surely a credible observer of disinformation as a threat would consider it laughable to suggest otherwise, even looking at U.S. politics, but especially now that anti-disinformation is itself becoming a weapon of war.
Jay Heisler is a Canada correspondent for Voice of America and teaches part time at a university in Canada.