A recent analysis of several social media platforms over the past month has found more than 300 posts denying or distorting Hamas' 7 October attack on Israel.

According to research from non-profit CyberWell, which monitors online antisemitism, these posts were viewed by nearly 26 million people.

During the 7 October attack, Hamas killed 1,200 people in southern Israel – mainly civilians – and kidnapped 240 others.

There is also evidence that points to Hamas having carried out rape and sexual violence during the unprecedented attack on Israel.

CyberWell assessed 910 potentially antisemitic posts to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X, finding that 313 either denied or distorted what took place on 7 October.

It said that 38 per cent of these posts denied that Hamas militants and their allies raped Israelis during their attack, while over 36 per cent claimed that Israel perpetrated or was directly responsible for the actions of Hamas militants.

The remaining posts aligned with several other narratives, including that Israel profited from the attack.

The organisation said that these posts were engaged with – reacted to, commented on, shared/retweeted – more than 901,233 times.

The non-profit, which released the report in advance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January, said that antisemites with algorithmically enhanced social media platforms exploit denial as a form of "delegitimising Jewish victimhood and spreading anti-Jewish hate in mainstream opinion”.

“The morning of October 7, Hamas militants sadistically recorded and, in some cases, even live-streamed their heinous attack to social media,” said CyberWell founder and executive director Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor. “Caught by surprise, these platforms rapidly became weapons of mass psychological terror during the attack, and once the true scope of terror was realised are now being used by Hamas supporters to deny and distort the attack.”

Montemayor said that while all mainstream social media platforms have community standards policies prohibiting the denial of violent events, which has been extended in practice to include Holocaust denial, these companies have yet to apply this policy to the denial of the events of 7 October, the largest violent atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust.

CyberWell said that this was a “policy gap”, calling on social media platforms to proactively make the change to their policies to stop the spread of anti-Jewish hate online.

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