On Augfollowing months of development work - the first official IDF page was launched in English and within one day boasted 90,000 followers (an Arabic-language page, with far fewer followers, appeared shortly thereafter). The comment function was disabled one day after launch. The army learned this lesson during the 2008-2009 Gaza incursion, when its YouTube channel was initially left open to commenters, many of whom turned out to be detractors. First was the populist character of the platform: “Facebook has a tabloid-y look to it,” an IDF official remarked in March 2011, “and we are, after all, a serious organization.” But perhaps most crucially, Facebook’s signature interactivity, with a “wall” open for public commentary, was regarded as a nearly insurmountable obstacle to the IDF’s aims, due to the anticipated fusillade of criticism. The standard Facebook template was initially seen as infeasible on several grounds. įor the IDF’s social media developers, Facebook was the paramount challenge, the site of both the biggest risks and the biggest opportunities. A senior member of the military’s new media team outlined the operational blueprint succinctly: We gather Twitter followers in times of peace, so that they are ready to disseminate our message when we are at war. The office of the army spokesperson, where social media work was initially housed, deemed these tools particularly essential during episodes of military confrontation. In the IDF’s assessment, Operation Cast Lead had proven the need - indeed, the imperative - for the military to become a skilled and fluent operator within the digital domain. In the years that followed, the IDF investment in social media would grow exponentially both in budgetary and manpower allocations and in scope, building on this ostensible wartime triumph. Despite widespread international condemnation of Cast Lead, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians, the military claimed a decisive public relations victory in the arena of social media, trumpeting the popularity of its YouTube initiative (some videos were viewed more than 2 million times). Then, the IDF launched its own YouTube channel to showcase footage of the Israeli assault and video blogs by army spokespersons - content designed to fill the void left by Israeli state-imposed restrictions on journalists’ access to the Gaza war zone.
The army’s interest in the wartime potential of social media can be traced to the first few days of the Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip in 2008-2009 (code-named Operation Cast Lead). The chief aim: to make them deployable in times of war.
Rather, over the course of the last few years, IDF institutions (along with other state organs) have gradually and carefully built up their presence on social media platforms and established these platforms as key weapons in the state’s public relations arsenal. What was lost in all this coverage was the history of the Israeli army’s social media investment, which long precedes 2012. Was Israel charting new worlds of warcraft? Would future war plans be molded in Israel’s likeness, employing a toolbox comprised of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr? Evident in much of the voluminous commentary was a tone of something like wonderment - as if once again, and even under rocket fire, Israeli technology cum modernity had triumphed. Numerous pundits mulled over the meaning of this vanguard shift in military and political strategy. A raft of stories led with the Israel Defense Forces’ use of the popular networking platforms to advance their public relations message, pointing to their use of Twitter to announce the army’s assassination of Hamas military commander Ahmad al-Ja‘bari and their slickly produced Facebook posts justifying the ongoing aerial bombardment.īy the end of the second day, the notion of a “Twitter battlefield” had become a journalistic truism. Within hours of the onset of Operation Pillar of Defense, Israel’s latest military campaign in the Gaza Strip, global news outlets had already turned their spotlight on social media.
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