Behind the Viral Post on Israel-Hamas Propaganda

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, INTERNATIONAL HOST: Now, whether it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or now the war between Israel and Hamas, people across the globe are voicing their opinions on social media. With that comes tribalism, deeper polarization, and often dehumanizing narratives. But author Ben Sheehan’s viral Instagram post called for greater compassion and nuance in response, and he now joins Michel Martin to discuss the dangers of propaganda on social media.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Ben Sheehan, thanks so much for talking with us.

BEN SHEEHAN, AUTHOR: Thank you so much for having me.

MARTIN: I think some people know your work because you’ve been in comedy for a long time. I mean, you were the executive producer at the comedy website, Funny or Die. And then, you pivoted to civics education. So, I mean, you’ve got a lot of different, you know, constituencies. The reason we called you is that you posted something on Instagram that just kind of went everywhere, and it just seemed so different from the tone of so much of what we were seeing on social media at the time. I think it really caught people’s attention. One of the things — what you said was, if you have less empathy towards victims because of how you feel about their government, propaganda is working on you. That was the first slide out of five. We’ll talk about the others. But just what inspired you?

SHEEHAN: You know, I had been working the last several months on a project around propaganda, actually the history of propaganda, specifically antisemitic propaganda and seeing some of the posts that were happening on Instagram and other social media platforms, I was seeing echoes of some of that. So, propaganda was already top of mind. And my takeaway from all of the research I was doing is that the main goal of propaganda is to dehumanize not just the recipient, but also people other than the recipient in order to justify support for honestly atrocious actions. So, I started to see posts that were disrespectful towards Israelis, disrespectful towards Palestinians, and I just wanted to take an opportunity to remind people that this is about everyone’s humanity. This is not about looking at somebody as though they are less than you, and we need to keep that in mind so that we can inoculate ourselves from propaganda.

MARTIN: Your post was seen by hundreds of millions of people, which is just hard even to wrap your head around. I mean, it was shared by celebrities, the Israeli actress Gal Gadot, Gwyneth Paltrow, Viola Davis, Padma Lakshmi, the comedian Sarah Silverman. The first slide, I’m just going to say it again, OK? It said, if you have less empathy towards victims because of how you feel about their government, propaganda is working on you. That was the first slide. The second, the goal of propaganda is to dehumanize. It works to dehumanize Israelis, and it works to dehumanize Gazans. Slide three, propaganda is everywhere. It seeps into us over time. It seeks to block our empathy receptors. So, when we see violence, we rationalize away our human response. Slide four, I like to think most of us are above propaganda, but this weekend reminded me how widespread it is because a lot of people reacted to this violence with justification, not empathy. I guess it’s not surprising, but it’s still heartbreaking. Slide five, killing innocent Palestinians is horrific. Killing innocent Israelis is horrific. If you don’t feel the same, I think you should ask yourself why that is. I mean, it just — honestly, it’s just so succinct and it’s not poetry, but it kind of feels like it is, in the sense that it captures something so profoundly. It almost like cuts you. And I was just kind of wondering how you were able to distill something into so few words.

SHEEHAN: Well, not to minimize what I wrote, but, you know, this is the world we live in where I was in a taxi ride to the airport and I just wrote it down in five minutes. I just sort of tried to distill my immediate reaction. And again, if it wasn’t the fact that I’ve been working on this research project, which is honestly looking at dog whistles, antisemitic dog whistles, and how those over time — the repetition of those and the variety of those can slowly cause people to think a certain way. So, it really is sort of like a faucet dripping rather than a fire hose. I saw posts like this in 2021, then when there was the last sort of major conflict in the region. And even going back to 2014. And so, really not to really being aware of just, you know, single post, but also how the totality and the sum of posts over time bit by bit can sort of chip away at our shared humanity.

MARTIN: You also wrote an essay in the “Daily Beast” about it, also about your — about the Instagram post, but then also kind of reacting to the reaction to it and sort of expanding more on your thoughts about this. The — how do you see this playing out, if you don’t — you know, going back to sort of the essay, how have you seen this playing out and have you seen it playing out in any ways surprised you?

SHEEHAN: Sure. So, you know, I talked about in the essay, sort of three different types of propaganda. There’s distortion, right? There’s taking something that is a video of an event from a year ago, five years ago, several weeks ago, and purporting as if it happened yesterday or the day before, right? You know, we can take videos out of context and change the caption and suddenly people will latch onto it as if it’s real and gospel and start sharing it, and that can have legitimately damaging consequences. And that is not in any way exclusive to one side of this conflict. The other thing is, you know, I’ve talked about this a lot of my own work around civics that applies to history as well, is that we Americans are not well educated, any of us really, the vast majority of us in the history of this region. And so, there are bad actors sometimes that will take framing devices that are overly simplified that condense things down into really easily understandable framework, and that’s appealing because it’s really daunting to self-educate. And then, the third thing, and that’s sort of a false compare — the false comparison, I like to call. And then, the last thing is omission, right? Is — you know, and this is where I talk about my own blind spots. And that came — it took me a long time to realize the blind spots that I had as somebody who has studied this region, but definitely was given a slanted version of it growing up in my own religious education, my Jewish education, my school education, university. And so, really looking inward at myself, always challenging myself to keep reading reliable, legitimate, factual sources. but the truth is that we are always trying to find ways to fill our knowledge gaps and that we’re always going to have knowledge gaps. So, being aware of what our own shortcomings is, is I think something that, myself included, a lot of people can relate to and have a responsibility to keep trying to correct.

MARTIN: How did you come to that insight for yourself that you had knowledge gaps, even though, you know, you’re Jewish by heritage, have, you know, certainly connections to the story as well as the religious importance, the personal importance of Israel to so many people, people in your family? So how did you see that in yourself, those knowledge gaps?

SHEEHAN: So, I have, you know, talking to Palestinian friends. It’s important to have people who have different backgrounds than mine and having conversations with them. And they were kind enough to take you know, the time to have those conversations, which I’m sure are painful. I don’t want to make it anybody else’s responsibility to educate me, but it’s good to have friends, you know, of varied backgrounds who are willing to take that time. But it really was a conversation that I had in 2019. I went on a trip to Israel and Palestine. So, we spent most of the time in Israel but we did spend some time in Ramallah. And it was a conversation —

MARTIN: Which is on the West Bank.

SHEEHAN: In the West Bank, yes. In the West Bank. And it was a conversation that I had with a young Palestinian DJ about my age and talking with him about his own experience and his family’s experience, and going back, you know, to the founding of Israel and also before, and it caused me to question my own background, to do more research, but to find, you know, little gaps in my knowledge and things that may have been omitted. And the thing that’s hard with omission is that you can present something that is entirely 100 percent factual, but simply leaves out information. So, you’re not distorting the information, you’re just not giving the entire picture. And it’s very hard when there are things that we don’t know that we don’t know. And so, it really is important to have conversations with people of different backgrounds, to go to these places, if you were fortunate and lucky enough to have the opportunity as I was to go on a sponsored trip to the region. But the other thing I sort of talked about in the essay is that social media works to put us in silos, right? The algorithms game it so that we’re constantly being fed things that we tend to already agree with. And so, we’re not just breaking out of knowledge gaps in our own lives, we’re also breaking out of this sort of, you know, silos that we put into just by the nature of using social media. So, hopefully, people can be more aware of that. Follow creators that may be different, have different backgrounds, talk to people who have different backgrounds, if you’re able to go to places, but this is a lot of responsibility. But as I mentioned yesterday, it’s honestly the least that we can do.

MARTIN: I wanted to go back to something you talked about. You talk about false comparison. You have an interesting analysis of — in your “Daily Beast” essay of people who compare the relationship that black Americans have — many black Americans have with law enforcement in the United States and the one that Palestinians have with the Israeli Defense Force. Could you just talk a little bit about your thoughts about that?

SHEEHAN: Yes, of course. So, you know — and I respect the approach of many journalists to try to find ways to create analogies where their audience can understand a situation. The problem is, is when you stop at the analogy. So, like I mentioned, you know, in a vacuum, the relationship between Israeli Defense Forces, the government defense forces and Palestinian civilians is analogous to a relationship between, you know, the police force and police officers in the United States, which are local governments, and African American civilians. But aside from that, we have different countries. We have different religions. We have different peoples. We have different relationships and dynamics. There’s so much history outside of that. So, I think the risk is in an effort to create an understanding of what’s going on we tend to leave out all the context of what makes it a different situation. And that involves a lot of — again, a lot of research because we don’t teach this stuff enough in our schools. We don’t teach history enough. We don’t teach civics enough. And I would also add, we don’t teach media literacy enough. This is something that’s become more and more of an important focus for people to understand how to be good, responsible news consumers on the internet and on social media platforms when you are being inundated with both accurate sources. And also, I would say, more often than not, inaccurate sources.

MARTIN: What’s the through line of your career? Do you see one? I mean, so comedy to civics education to — I mean, I don’t know. Are they related?

SHEEHAN: Either I get bored easily or there is a through line that exists. I often think about an event that happened when I was five years old. I was sitting at the dinner table and my parents worked in the government or with the government in politics. And my mom took a napkin and she drew a house and on one side of the house she wrote the number 435, and on the other side of the house, she wrote the number 100. And that was my first lesson about Congress. And it was very simple, it was literally back of the napkin. And, you know, several decades later, I’m trying to find ways to take that napkin, take that pen and simplify things for other people so that they can have more of an understanding of it and really just have it be an entry point for a lifetime of learning and self-educating.

MARTIN: And how does that loop into your concerns, fears about propaganda, especially in the social media age? I mean, is part of your fear that the reason — part of the reason we are susceptible to propaganda is we don’t really know how the government works, are supposed to work or something? I mean, what’s the what’s the through line there? Is there one?

SHEEHAN: I think it’s even deeper, you know, in a democracy of representative democracy, a democratic country where people ultimately choose their leaders if we don’t have a common foundation of just simple facts on which to agree, then we’re going to start to fight each other. We’re not going to be able to make a well-educated decision on who our leaders should be. And then, we start to have people coming to power who are not representative of the people’s wishes. And I think that is very much the case in both with Israel and with Palestine. You have governments that are led by people that don’t represent the majority of the civilians, of the voters, as we’ve seen by the way, in Israel in the last year. We had people, hundreds of thousands, taking to the streets to protest Netanyahu’s attempt to weaken the Supreme Court, a whole branch of the government. So, we’re seeing the results of something when we have extremist leaders that don’t represent who I believe to be the majority or the majority sentiment of civilians. And I’m seeing the beginning stages of that in this country, with things like with gerrymandering, other ways to sort of tilt the playing field. And so, I think it’s really important for people to be aware of that. And through all the work that I do, whether it’s, you know, political, historical, comedic, I’m always coming back to that same point, which is we need to have a shared understanding of facts and reality in order to make the best decisions for who our leaders should be.

MARTIN: But wait, wait, wait. Aren’t we already there? We already don’t have a shared version of reality. I mean, you have members of Congress who do not accept — at least they say that they do not accept, that the January 6th mob attack on the Capitol was an effort to overthrow the government. I mean, you have elected leaders, elected officials saying that these were just tourists taking a tour.

SHEEHAN: Right.

MARTIN: And they were there. And they were there. And so, you know — I don’t know, I kind of — aren’t we already there in a way, or is that one of those false comparisons that you’re warning us about?

SHEEHAN: No, I think we definitely are there when it comes to certain things like what happened on January 6th. I also want to note the role that, you know, gerrymandering plays in selecting our members of the House, right? We have — the vast majority of districts are not competitive and they’re drawn in a way so that only a minority of districts in the House are competitive. So, it’s sort of things like that that are manipulating who ends up in Congress and I don’t think, because of that, that they are accurately representative of public opinion.

MARTIN: You talk about the need to retain empathy at a time like this. And, you know, you and I are sitting here in our respective places, and we’re clean, safe, warm, and dry, right? And I’m thinking about these people who watch their relatives get gunned down in their kitchens. Who watch their loved ones get shoved in the back of a car by their hair and dragged to Gaza to be held as hostages, right? Not knowing what is happening to them. And I’m also thinking about people who’ve watched their loved ones or other people they care about, like, digging their kids out of rubble with their bare hands. What do you do with all that? Is that your argument that the need to retain empathy is that for all of us or is that for those of us who have the luxury of being dispassionate at this moment, if I could put it that way? What do you think?

SHEEHAN: I think that — I have friends of mine whose family members were abducted by Hamas from their kibbutz and brought to Gaza and my friends have no idea what’s happening to them. I have friends who are Palestinian whose relatives have experienced unimaginable things happening to them and their homes over the last several decades people who have been driven from their homes and can never go back. And I think there’s a tendency, and I’m not here to lay blame on the news media, exclusively or mostly or anything, but I think there’s a tendency to report things in statistics that kind of are hard to grasp our heads around, right? If we hear stats of the X, 50 people are killed, 100 people are killed, 500 people killed, it sounds horrible, and the numbers that escalate are even more horrible, but we don’t relate to it as much as an image of a child who survived a bombing and is shell-shocked and doesn’t know how to respond. We don’t respond to it as much as a single case study of a child, and that child being in Gaza. We don’t respond to it as much as seeing a video of a child who lived on a kibbutz finding out that none of his family members survived. There’s a specific humanity that is awoken in us, stimulated us a locked in us by seeing a single case study of a person, and I think great literature does that and I think great news media does that because it allows us to see ourselves in that person, at least — at the very least, maybe not understand what they’re going through, but recognize the humanity and feel empathy.

MARTIN: Ben Sheehan, thanks so much for talking with us today.

SHEEHAN: Thanks for having me.