Terror and propaganda walk hand in hand. It happened during the invasion of Ukraine and it has happened again in the Middle East. Every time you see a video of Hamas kidnappings or a bombing by the Israeli army on your mobile phones, do not believe that it is informative material. It's propaganda. Pure and tough. The battlefield is also the screen.
The propagandists' goal is to legitimize their story and, in the case of terrorists, generate panic. The more people the images reach, the better. That is why all organizations that use violence have their propaganda apparatus. In Spain we suffered it with ETA. Audiovisual media are of increasingly higher quality. Sometimes everything seems like a video game or a movie. I wish it were. The images go viral. The violent ones win and we don't realize it.
Israel has joined this propaganda battle. The main channel chosen is Netanyahu's X account, where air force bombings against Gaza are broadcast. Iron hand in search of recovering credit. Nothing new under the sun either. Before, wars were told by correspondents. Now they are broadcast live, and done by governments and terrorist organizations.
The novelty is called social networks. It is no longer necessary to go to the cinema to see Leni Riefenstahl's productions justifying the Third Reich. The new thing is X, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook; and from the sofa you can comfortably consume that propaganda. Yesterday the old Twitter announced that it would restrict some images to censor inappropriate content. In two days it distributed 50 million publications about the conflict.
Dealing with these types of acts is not easy. In fact, the greatest communication experts make mistakes. In this country, without going any further, ETA had a powerful public speaker for years. And free.
How to combat propaganda? There are those who are betting on an information blackout. The historic communicator McLuhan, for example, said that without communication there would be no terrorism. “If there is no information, terrorist acts will fail to fulfill one of their objectives, to spread terror,” added the professor at the Pompeu Fabra University, Miquel Rodrigo.
This theory has been complicated by the lack of control of social networks. Self-censorship, then, does not seem like the solution. The key lies in two aspects: neutrality and, above all, respecting the victims, something that is valid for all types of violence. It is about informing with rigor.
