Sister Minnie is a cat with wide amber eyes, doughy face, and fur the color of a storm cloud. Her good looks have earned her more than 700,000 followers on Instagram—but lately her account is doing something more serious than your typical funny internet cat: distributing on-the-ground reporting from Gaza.
Of course, it's Sister Minnie’s human family who are doing most of that work. Her owner, Palestinian-American businesswoman Zainah Meqdadi, is coordinating much of the coverage along with the account’s loyal fanbase. Since the events of Oct. 7, videos of Minnie prancing, purring, and adorably misbehaving have been replaced by videos of cats on the streets of Gaza picking their way through rubble and providing comfort to distraught owners.
Minnie and Zainah aren’t the only Instagram influencers that have pivoted to posting about the war in Gaza. Fashion influencers like Huda Beauty and Tamanna Roashan, cooking and home decorating creators like @athomewith__tanzin, and skincare influencers like Asalet Yener are also sharing Gaza content with their audiences.
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Jalal Abukhater, a West Bank journalist working with the Palestinian digital rights activist organization 7amleh, told The Daily Beast that “social media plays a vital, not complimentary, role in ensuring that Palestinian narratives are heard.”
While much of this posting revolves around traditional activist infographics and appeals, these influencers are also an important distribution channel and support network for journalists working in Gaza. Social media users who usually watch funny videos, storytimes, and make-up recommendations are now being connected with reporting from a war zone.
Amplification Efforts
Since the beginning of the invasion and bombardment, international journalistic organizations have had difficulty reporting out and verifying information from within the Gaza Strip. The nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists cites dangerous conditions and a reported "communications blackout" coordinated by the Israel Defence Forces. Journalists, like everyone else in Gaza, are caught up in bombings and violence, particularly since the end of the ceasefire on December 1st.
Activists like Abukhater also see “deliberate silencing or total omission of Palestinian experience in mainstream reporting,” a feeling echoed by many influencers, activists, and journalists working in the space.
That’s where influencers step in: Their efforts to connect international audiences to journalists inside Gaza like Motaz Azaizah, Plestia Alaqad, and Bisan Owda have helped the follower counts of these journalists skyrocket. According to Social Blade, a social media analytics site, each of these journalists has gained the vast majority of their followers in the past two months.
Social media journalism is not a new phenomenon. “It’s a natural impulse,” Brookings Institution Fellow Valerie Wirtschafter told The Daily Beast, “when the traditional media environment is unable to exist potentially because of danger, or because they don’t know where to look.” In the case of journalism about Gaza, there is also a question of credibility: many activists don’t trust the mainstream media to get the story right.
Since Instagram is a visual medium, much of the reporting that’s shared about Gaza comes in the form of photojournalism and vlogs—and since it's also a social medium, the comments sections on posts from journalists and influencers alike are full of people tagging each other into the conversation, sharing their grief, and debating the issues.
Accounts that usually post about other things are working to reach audiences with information that wouldn’t otherwise be in their media diet. In an era of misinformation and spin, influencers are contextualizing complicated issues, filtering information, and serving journalism to their audiences.
“It’s always a challenge in a low information context,” Wirtschafter said. “It’s a challenging, delicate balancing act very likely to stumble into pitfalls from the incentive structure of virality and the platforms.”
Influencers distributing online reporting can raise awareness, counteracting biases or oversights in traditional media, but their audiences might not be getting the context they need to understand what’s happening or who they’re hearing it from. Media ethics and disinformation researcher Whitney Phillips told The Daily Beast that the online information ecosystem is a sort of “biomass pyramid” in this way.
“People want to focus on the lions, tigers, and bears, but everything energizes everything else,” Phillips said. “And so in what we choose to do online, the underlying question is who or what are we choosing to energize? These posters are choosing to energize these voices, and that impacts the overall ecosystem.”
In comments on videos posted by journalists like Bisan Owda, popular influencer accounts float to the top, offering messages of support. Like any online community, larger accounts tend to link and share with smaller accounts. One of the biggest ones is @eye.on.palestine,which serves to aggregate a lot of the reporting which others then share.
Many of the posts are about posting. “You see these 4 buttons? Right now our heroes (journalists) are on ground in Gaza,” Meqdadi wrote in one caption. “If we all engage in their content we can help amplify their voices.” Influencers tag journalists in Gaza, and ask their followers to link them to more people.
Similar amplification efforts are performed by influencers like Tammana Roashan, who has pinned a series of stories to her profile, one titled “READ ME” and the other with a watermelon emoji, an online symbol of Palestine. The stories are curated collections of dozens of posts from many different people showing facts, bulletins, and footage from Gaza. Alongside these pinned stories are more typical content: notifications about sales at her online shop, life updates, and travel pictures.
Dealing With Meta
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri wrote a post on Threads earlier this year saying the new platform wouldn’t promote political news because it is “not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let's be honest) or integrity risks” associated with it. In 2022, Facebook did away with its News Tab feature and took action to reduce the amount of political content that showed up in user feeds. Many news organizations have felt these moves hit their wallets and pageviews.
The platforms that these influencers are sharing the news on, then, do not really want to be used for news. Mosseri and others have taken pains to clarify that Instagram is not trying to censor news, but would rather have these influencers talking about make-up and cats instead.
Instagram’s content moderation policies about the Israel-Palestine conflict have also attracted scrutiny in the past, with Human Rights Watch finding that in 2021 it wrongfully removed pro-Palestine content that did not actually violate community guidelines. Abukhater contends that Palestinians “face significant and disproportionate censorship on Meta’s social media platforms.” The shadowbans, comment-hiding, limits on the use of Live features, and algorithmic manipulation are not a quirk, but rather a feature of online activist life.
In the comments on videos from the journalists within Gaza, people encourage others to email Human Rights Watch about actions taken by Meta to muffle reporters. When Instagram removed the sound from a November 11 video posted by journalist Bisan Owda about killings at the al-Shifa hospital, the comments section was full of lip readers transcribing what Owda said.
Users work together to provide on-the-ground context and information after social media companies attempt to mute and censor journalists.
Screengrab by Aidan WalkerLifestyle and cooking content creator Tanzin Cook, @athomewith__tanzin has provided several transcriptions, and told The Daily Beast that in addition to helping restore deleted audio, the transcriptions “help non-English speakers and those with hearing impairments to ‘hear’ Palestinian voices.”
But, Cook says, transcriptions “are often deleted, and my account is occasionally restricted because IG deems my transcriptions spam. When I notify IG of the error, nothing occurs.” Similar stories are told across the comments section on a lot of journalism from Gaza.
Doing All They Can
Influencers have the power to make their audiences aware of information they otherwise wouldn’t know. There are good reasons to get your news from outlets other than internet cats and make-up influencers, especially in an era when almost anyone can make a convincing deepfake.
But there are also reasons people are willing to turn to these users for news. “The personalized element, seeing their life, feeling you know them is really powerful for an audience,” Wirtschafter explained. “That trust is so huge.”
For people who don’t hear the stories they care about told in traditional media, social media offers a compelling alternative. Phillips, who teaches at the University of Oregon’s journalism school, said she sometimes encounters “an expectation that journalists will get things wrong” in her teaching and research practice.
For some, an informal and personalized delivery style is more convincing than the formal, professionalized style of traditional journalism, which can seem scripted. “It’s about the identities people bring to the screen,” Phillips said.
Content creators, who have been sharing their identities with the screen for years, are doing it in a new way and sharing information about an important cause. Abukhater says that social media sharing enables “others to understand their roles and responsibilities, and perhaps take action in times of crisis.”
“I'm just a working mum of two,” Tanzin Cook told The Daily Beast. “So I don't know how much I'm helping with what I'm doing—but I am trying as I hope everyone is.”
