By Ella Mishan

Since the October 7 massacres in Israel that were perpetrated by Hamas in 2023, some have been scrambling to outright deny certain events and/or justify the terrorist attack as a means of resistance to what they often label as ‘Israel’s occupation of Palestinians’. This article seeks to unpack the different forms of October 7 denial and justification over a number of New Zealand-based accounts on a variety of social media platforms.

October 7th is described as the worst massacre of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust and was one of the worst terrorist attacks in history. Beginning early in the morning after a barrage of rockets was fired into Israel as early as 6:30am, around 3,000 Hamas terrorists breached the fence separating Gaza and Israel with a bulldozer and flooded southern Israel’s kibbutzim and nearby Nova music festival. Around 1,200 Israelis were murdered and another 250 taken hostage. It is unknown how many of the remaining 116 hostages are still alive today, more than 300 days since their capture.

Some of the main denial narratives disseminated on social media are: a) no rape or sexual violence was inflicted on Israelis during the massacre, b) Israel fabricated the ‘story of October 7’ and is profiting off it now, and c) Israel is the culprit behind the massacre.

Justification of the massacre has also been widespread amongst some who claim to support the Palestinian cause, with the attacks being contextualised and relativised through arguments that ‘this war didn’t start on October 7’ and that Israel has been ‘occupying and oppressing’ Palestinians since her instatement in 1948, and that therefore October 7 was a justified ‘uprising’. ‘uprising’ is justified.

Another piece of misinformation that has been spread is the idea that ‘sure, maybe Hamas took hostages, but Israel has been holding Palestinians prisoners for decades’, often omitting that those prisoners are prisoners because they committed crimes. Ultimately these narratives simplify and obfuscate the truth and can create false moral equivalency.

In this briefing we look at six examples of October 7 denial and justification from New Zealand social media users.

Example 1

This comment on Facebook states that “the lie about Oct 7 … was all an inside job planned by Netinyahoo (Benjamin Netanyahu)” and that the “idf killed their own and blame hamas”. This comment negates all of the heavily proven and well-documented evidence that October 7th did happen and was perpetrated by Hamas. It uses the “lie about beheaded babies”, which was a misinformed story that got inflated, to string all the other horrific events of that day into the same line of ‘misinformation’ while vilifying the IDF against the very people, citizens of Israel, it is their duty to protect.

Example 2

This comment on Instagram states that “… Oct 7th is nothing but emotive propaganda”. This is outright denying that the events of that day even occurred and that it is simply a fabricated story used by people including journalists and their bosses who are “… working to promote Israel” playing into the known antisemitic conspiracy that Jews control world media.

Example 3

This Facebook comment talks about the “…ruthless propaganda across the west providing vile fabricated horror stories of Oct 7th”, again blatantly denying the well-documented and proven events that occurred in Israel as “fabricated”. They also talk about the “western Jewish lobby (being) incredibly powerful and rich” which is why you might “lose your academic career if you speak out” supposedly in favour of the Palestinian cause. This comment also plays into the aforementioned antisemitic rhetoric of Jews controlling the media and general world Jewish conspiracy that is dangerous and hateful, not to mention wrong in the ideas it promotes about Jews.

Example 4

This comment is a response to someone else’s comment on Instagram saying “F*ck your October 7 bullshit”, a more blatant, rash and emotive way of saying the October 7 events never happened. They also say “What about all the Palestinians that have been subjected to horrific shit” which highlights another common theme across antisemitism within the Free Palestine movement which is the inability to recognise more than one type of suffering. The concept that the simultaneous suffering of multiple different people’s can mutually exist is not widely recognised in this situation where Israel is viewed as the ‘oppressor’ and Palestinians as the ‘oppressed’. To many who buy into this narrative it’s therefore incomprehensible that the supposed oppressor (Israel/Israelis) may also have suffered/be suffering.

Example 5

This comment on Twitter states that “do you condemn Hamas” is like the question “do you condemn He Taua for going in and giving those vile, violent racist misogynists in the Auckland Uni Engineering society the bash?” to which they respond “F*ck no lmfao die mad”. This refers to a situation that occurred in 1979 when a group called He Taua confronted University of Auckland (UOA) engineering students performing a mock haka, a pre-capping tradition that started in 1954. Maori students protested against it finding it offensive and members of the activist group, He Taua, after physically confronting them, were according to UOA today, unjustly charged with a number of offences (including rioting) in what became known as the ‘the Haka Party Incident’. This comparison is extremely warped for multiple reasons, the main one being, the comparison between Hamas and He Taua is offensive and unjust as Hamas is an internationally recognised terrorist group and He Taua was nothing remotely close to this. The commenter ultimately uses the Haka Party incident to compare what Hamas perpetrated on October 7 as being justified.

Example 6

This Reddit comment reads “Israel is a coloniser Apartheid regime. Zionists started this conflict, it didn’t begin on October 7th”. The use of the words coloniser and apartheid in relation to Israel is misinformed and not factual based on the definitions of both words. Furthermore, the comment uses those statements as ammunition to justify the idea that this current conflict didn’t begin on October 7th and that the “zionists”, in this context the ‘Israelis’, brought the horrors of October 7th upon themselves. This comment is antisemitic in its attempts to justify October 7th through aforementioned descriptions of Israel, descriptions of one Israeli minister’s polarising statements about  “using nukes to eradicate Palestinians” and describing Palestinians as being “oppressed (supposedly by Israelis) because of their ethnicity”. If it wasn’t for the mention of October 7 and the “zionists started this conflict”, the commenters’ intent may have been more ambiguous.

Social media platform policies

X and TikTok have policies that explicitly prohibit the denial of violent events. X’s abuse and harassment community guidelines state that they:

prohibit content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occurred, and when the content is shared with abusive context. This may include references to such an event as a “hoax” or claims that victims or survivors are fake or “actors.” It includes, but is not limited to, events like the Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.

TikTok prohibits “conspiracy theories that … [deny] well-documented violent events”.

Other platforms, like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn, have guidelines and policies that deal with misinformation. However, these have a focus on misinformation mainly related to vaccines, COVID-19, and election interference.

While the denial of violent events should fall under general misinformation policies, there are other forms of violent event denial that circulates on social media other than October 7. The Holocaust and the Sandy Hook school shooting are two significant examples. The denial of violent events leads to more harm to the victims and the communities impacted by the event, and can also result in these groups being vilified and targeted once again through cyberbullying, and online threats and harassment.

The posts shown in this briefing that deny and justify October 7 are yet to be removed by the respective platforms. We call on social media networks that already have guidelines about violent event denial in place to enforce them, and we urge other platforms that only prohibit misinformation to seriously consider developing policies that directly address this issue.