IDF was in own ‘Twitterverse’ during war, computer analysis finds

The Israel Defense Forces fought its best Twitter war to date during Operation Protective Edge, but did not actively engage the “Twitterverse,” according to an Israeli computer analysis.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit tweeted early and often, using slick infographics and near-real-time battlefield images to promote its version of events, said Tomer Simon, a doctoral student at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, who carried out the analysis of tweets during the war. But he found that the IDF barely used hashtags, retweets, or replies to interact with other Twitter users.

“The IDF used Twitter as another channel to transmit data,” said Simon, who created the software behind the analysis, called TwitterMate, as part of his doctoral research in emergency management. “While they provided narrative and information at a really amazing pace, you don’t open social media to have uni-directional communication. It’s about bi-directional communication — a conversation.”

The IDF, for its part, said it made a strategic decision not to play the “hashtag game” during the war, and instead chose to focus on producing “clean” content to serve journalists and other opinion makers.

A real-time information war

Simon’s TwitterMate software acts like TIVo for Twitter, recording whichever tweets are of interest at a certain time — based on account or hashtag. Then, by deploying a variety of natural language processing tools, the software determines the “five Ws” of the tweets: who, what, when, where, and why.

In a recently published journal article, Simon used TwitterMate to analyze the 2013 attack in the Westgate Mall in Kenya by the militant Islamist group al-Shabaab. Simon is in the midst of analyzing more than 3 million tweets from Operation Protective Edge — another conflict that took place in close quarters, with the world watching — to create a protocol for emergency authorities during future crises.

Based on his analysis so far, Simon says, it is clear that Israel upgraded its Twitter arsenal ahead of this summer. The IDF unleashed a barrage of tweets, posting some 1,000 times from its English account, @IDFSpokesperson, over the course of the 50-day war between July 8 and Aug. 26 — an average of 20 tweets a day.

Compared to during the previous Gaza war, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, the IDF tweeted information much more quickly. Informative and well-designed infographics and subtitled videos from the battlefield appeared to go up within minutes, rather than hours, of being shared among troops, he says based on news reports and insider interviews.

WATCH: Our forces killed Hamas terrorists who infiltrated Israel today from Gaza https://t.co/XWDnUqt5yF

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— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) July 21, 2014

“When you have a real-time information war, you need to have real-time information,” said Sacha Drawta, the head of the IDF’s New Media Desk, established in 2009. “The whole army understands the importance of the visual content. They understand why we need to communicate fast and strong. So they worked with us very well.”

While the IDF produced a lot of convincing content, it seldom interacted with other users — even less than in the past, Simon says. The IDF’s English account never used a hashtag; it posted just 9 tweets from other users, and replied to a total of three tweets — and then only to direct users to its other Twitter accounts in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and French, according to Simon’s analysis.

Simon says interaction is the key to making your voice heard on Twitter. Hashtags connect tweets to hot topics, and retweets and replies can cheer supporters and check opponents, he says. Most importantly, he says, all these tools bring more views to tweets.

Drawta says the IDF made a conscious decision to be less interactive than it was during Operation Pillar of Defense. Given the 140-character limit of a tweet, he says his desk decided hashtags were not best use of valuable space. The strategy was to monitor the conversation and to put out in-demand information quickly and accurately, trusting journalists and Israel advocates would make effective use of it.

“Every journalist around the world was watching our Twitter feed, our Facebook feed, our blog,” Drawta said. “We didn’t need to be interactive. I believe in this kind of conflict, the content is the king. So I wanted to keep our content clean. The more you’re clean, the more you’re strong.”

He added, “Everyone can argue a different view. There isn’t a Torah of social media.”

Fast and furious

On the other side, Simon says, Hamas continued its longtime strategy of aggressive engagement on Twitter during the war. He says terrorist organizations, including al-Shabaab, tend to be bullies on social media, trying to seize control of the narrative.

Hamas tweeted about the same amount as the IDF from its English accounts, including the now-suspended @AlqassamBrigade, Simon says. But, he says, Hamas-backed allies took shots at opponents, and even tried to censor journalists and intimidate Israelis on Twitter. By Simon’s count, Hamas in English used hashtags in about 450 tweets (almost a third of the total), retweeted about 250 times, and replied about 500 times.

@LazSim @allissonCD take this picture down to protect our goal

— Ezzedeen Al-Qassam (@qassamenglish) July 18, 2014

Like al-Shabaab, Hamas was able to survive the suspension of several of its accounts, apparently due to Twitter policy violations, by switching to standbys. Simon counted a total of five active Hamas accounts in English during the war. Though the suspended accounts are no longer visible, TwitterMate saves every tweet it analyzes. Hamas also tweets in Arabic and Hebrew.

Simon and Drawta agree that Israel will always be the underdog in the online Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During the war, the pro-Palestinian hashtag #gazaunderattack was tweeted some 2.6 million times, according to Topsy, a social media analytics firm. On the other hand, Topsy said the pro-Israel hashtag #israelunderfire was tweeted less than a 10th as often — just 283,050 times.

The Twitter war, though, is fought for the hearts and minds of people who have yet to pick a hashtag. Simon says he is working on guidelines to help the IDF and other Israeli authorities optimize and coordinate their social media strategy. Call it a “Torah of social media.”