In February 2025, Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies published a poll showing that 46% of people between the ages of 18 and 24 in the United States supported Hamas – not the Palestinians, but Hamas. The same poll showed that 39% of this same demographic opposed the unconditional release of the Israeli hostages.
How did we ever get to this situation?
In an October 2024 poll of Americans, Pew Research found that “adults under the age or 30 are as likely to trust information from social media as they are to trust national media outlets.” A poll two months before found that 52% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 got their political news from TikTok and 50% of users of X said that they regularly get their “news” from that platform.
What is the “news” about Jews and Israel that the “under 30s” are seeing on social media?
Nonprofit antisemitism monitoring platform Cyberwell reported in late 2024 that 11 months after the October 7 attacks there had been a “36% increase in online Jew-hatred” and a “doubling in outright calls to violence against Jews.” None of this is happening by chance. The speed of which antisemitic content is created, the consistency of the messaging and the specific targeting of younger people unambiguously reflects a well thought out and well managed social media strategy. One Palestinian advocate has called this coordinated effort the “Instafada: social media as resistance.” Another noted that its strategic use of “social media….. has empowered laypeople to coordinate, take to the streets in protest, build encampment protests on universities, initiate petitions and fundraisers, disrupt politicians, stop arms factories, and revive the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign (which has ultimately affected the profits of corporations like Starbucks and McDonald’s).”
A perfect example of this strategy in action was the campaign launched by Hamas supporters denying that Israelis were sexually assaulted during the October 7 terrorist attacks. Despite the fact that Hamas live-streamed and shared videos of women being raped, there was a massive online campaign conducted last February and March by pro-Hamas influencers and activists calling the reported sexual assaults “atrocity propaganda,” intended to distract the public from the war and to “unfairly demonize Hamas.”
It is therefore no surprise that under 30s are disproportionately supporting Hamas and against something as fundamentally humanitarian as releasing the hostages.
How has the organized Jewish community responded to this onslaught of online hate?
It hasn’t.
In the last year, I have had several tens of conversations with leading Jewish organizations and philanthropists and have been shocked how little has been done to reclaim the social media narrative.
There is no successful company in the world, especially one focused on consumers, that does not have a social media strategy. Every company is in a race to use the most cutting edge technology to gather customer and sentiment data, analyze it and provide the quasi-real time, targeted content that each one of us sees every time we are on line. Many of these great companies have been founded and are managed by Jews (as are many of their technology providers and marketing consultants).
Yet, the same people who would fire their marketing executives for failing to have an online strategy to protect their companies financially are somehow transformed once they sit around the board table of a Jewish organization and fail to demand that a social media strategy be implemented to protect their communities and Israel. How has every company globally understood the importance of a social media strategy and the organized Jewish community has not?
Individuals such as Hen Mazzig, Ella Keinan, Noa Tishby, Eyal Yaacobi, and others are producing fabulous content but it is largely shared by the same people to the same people, remaining largely in the echo chamber.
Imagine there was a strategy, and the technology to enable it, that allowed every Birthright participant, every Hillel member, every AIPAC volunteer, every UJA donor, every person, Jewish and non-Jewish, who cared about the raging antisemitism, to become a ”micro-influencer” in the fight against Jew-hate. Imagine a centralized and accessible repository of great pro-Jewish, pro-Israel content. Imagine a database of campaigns that worked and did not so that the learnings belonged to the entire community. Imagine a community of communities that was networked online and engaged.
We, in Israel, are called the Start-Up Nation. We have developed great technologies to solve many of the world’s problems. It is now time for the Jewish people to start thinking about how we use technology and our gift for innovation to defend our people and our country in the online war for public opinion.
Alan Feld is the Founder and Managing Partner of Vintage Investment Partners, one of Israel’s largest venture capital firms and chairman of a number of nonprofit initiatives.
