Let us take you back to Oct. 7. A nation is reeling from a devastating terrorist attack. Thousands have been murdered. Families are grieving. The military response is beginning. And a terrorist leader has a message ready for the world, justifying the horrific acts of mass murder of civilians.
The message has already been recorded. As the first strikes begin, the videotape reaches Al Jazeera. The terrorist leader appears before a global audience, praises the attack, justifies the violence that produced it and warns that more will follow.
You may think we are describing Oct. 7, 2023. We are not.
This is Oct. 7, 2001.
Twenty-six days after 9/11, as the first U.S. missiles fell on Afghanistan, Qatar-owned Al Jazeera broadcast a prerecorded video of Osama bin Laden justifying the attacks. Major American television networks quickly agreed to review and edit his prerecorded statements rather than air them live and unedited.
The distinction was simple, but meaningful: Reporting on a terrorist’s message to the outside world is different from volunteering to be their global broadcaster.
Exactly 22 years later, on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel and targeted Israeli civilians in a mass act of terror, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.
But this time, the information environment was radically different. There was no television slot to fill. There were feeds.
Hamas understood the new environment and carried out what CyberWell describes as the most effective hijacking of major social-media platforms by a terrorist organization to date, effectively seizing them as a global broadcast system. Three years later, we still see a massive systemic loophole, arguably a tech governance failure that made that hijacking of our digital spaces possible.
There is a gaping hole in the protective layer of what we should be expecting from the facilitators of the information space in the face of global terrorist movements. Major social-media platforms prohibit terrorist organizations from freely abusing their services and apps to spread their propaganda but fail to do the same for state-owned media accounts on their platforms.
There is a gaping hole in the protective layer of what we should be expecting from the facilitators of the information space in the face of global terrorist movements.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, CyberWell has repeatedly documented terrorist-produced media flooding mainstream social-media platforms through prominent news and media accounts, as-is, unedited, including attack footage, hostage-related psychological-warfare videos and lengthy speeches by terrorist spokespeople. While reporting, contextualizing and analyzing such material is legitimate and necessary, utilizing news media accounts with global followings of millions of users to upload and stream a terrorist organization’s propaganda amplifies the corrosive psychological and social effects of that terrorism and hatred beyond geographic borders and undermines efforts to fight and thwart the attack in real-time.
Hamas used the same machinery as bin Laden did following the 9/11 terror attacks, keeping a steady feed of its curated content about the hostages, releasing letters, statements and videos portraying captivity and captors in favorable terms at strategically useful moments. But this time, the barn door was wide open to reach global audiences. Al Jazeera, RT, TRT and Al Arabiya have come up in our research as some of the lead abusers of what social-media platforms refer to as the “newsworthy exception” in their policies to distribute unfettered terror propaganda, footage of attacks and statements by the terrorists who planned or led them.
And while these news media outlets also air television broadcasts that have an end point, their social-media assets platforming pro-terror content do not. The design of social-media platforms breathes new life into terror videos. Content is clipped, downloaded, reposted, translated, turned into audio, stripped of context, memed and rediscovered for the masses in the wake of a major attack years later.
Consider what happened only weeks after Oct. 7, when the 2002 text widely known as Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” suddenly found a new generation of followers. Beyond being terrorist propaganda, the document contained explicit antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control of American politics, media and the economy. As videos promoting it spread in November 2023, TikTok removed content under its terrorism policies and restricted related searches, while The Guardian removed its longstanding online copy after concluding that it was circulating without sufficient context.
Meanwhile, the inverted red triangle—originally used in Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades’ propaganda videos to mark civilian and military targets—was adopted and amplified far beyond its original use, after repeated exposure and amplification through news media accounts on social platforms. By October 2024, CyberWell documented Hamas incorporating the triangle into its own “Military Media” logo. A propaganda device had become a social-media symbol, then fed back into Hamas’s own branding.
The contrast should trouble us. Platforms recognized that a two-decade-old terrorist propaganda asset, broken into excerpts and reactions, could become dangerous in the current information environment. Yet at the same historical moment, Hamas terrorists who had just carried out a horrific massacre and were still holding men, women and babies hostage were gaining mass distribution on social media for their unedited propaganda through prominent news accounts.
Today, 53% of American adults say they at least sometimes get news from social media. Large news organizations bring enormous audiences and engagement to those platforms. Their reach should demand greater clarity and responsibility—not a different safety standard.
This is not an argument against legitimate reporting on terrorist organizations. It is a question of how these platforms treat terrorist-produced material when news and media accounts redistribute it substantially intact.
Strip everything else away, and the Trust & Safety question—an evaluation method used to measure how effectively a platform protects users from harm; enforces its community rules; and handles systemic risks like fraud and misinformation—is almost embarrassingly simple. What happens when a piece of media produced by a terrorist organization—an attack video, hostage video, lengthy propaganda speech—would be prohibited in the hands of the organization that made it, but achieves mass distribution because a news account uploads substantially the same asset?
While this may not be an open-and-shut policy problem, it’s one that social-media platforms still refuse to meaningfully engage with three years after Oct. 7, 2023.
Platforms should establish clear, consistently enforced standards that distinguish reporting from redistribution by requiring:
- meaningful editorial intervention and context for terrorist-produced material;
- heightened safeguards around hostage exploitation, attack footage and long-form terrorist speeches; and
- restrictions on recommendation and reuse whenever the underlying propaganda asset is substantially preserved.
- same enforcement standards in practice for major news media accounts as for on-the-ground journalists and smaller independent news accounts.
Oct. 7, 2023 was an unprecedented Trust & Safety test for social-media platforms. They were forced to make policy and enforcement decisions in real time, under extraordinary conditions. Three years later, those conditions can no longer explain an unresolved loophole.
In 2001, broadcasters had to decide how much airtime to give Osama bin Laden. In 2026, there is no airtime to run out of. That makes the responsibility greater, not smaller. While the platforms may not have had time to get this right on Oct. 7, three years is enough.
