Al-Qassam’s day on X

On January 8th, the military wing of HAMAS, The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, announced the launch of their official account on platform X (formerly Twitter). The Al-Qassam profile had been active since January 7th, but the group only made the announcement the following day. The account quickly gained traction, attracting more than 100,000 followers in just several hours. Furthermore, the use of a platform like X provided users with the opportunity to immediately express their viewpoints and engage in direct dialogue with the source. The World News Monitors (WNM) team collected and analyzed the user engagements during the lifespan of the Al-Qassam Twitter account.
Initially garnering a few thousand followers, likely transferred from Telegram, the Al-Qassam account reached a peak of 146.3K followers before being banned from the platform in about 4 hours.

Al-Qassam’s X account from the time of the Telegram announcement to the suspension on X

The content primarily featured reposts from the group’s Telegram channel, detailing the brigade’s operations and activities. On X, users swiftly began to show their support and endorsement for the Al-Qassam brigades:

“Most honorable and prestigious entity to create an account on X. Praise to Allah for the blessing of Al-Qassam.”

“The purist and the most beautiful account on this platform, I swear by Allah I was happy with all my heart.”

Supportive comments quickly accumulated on the account, with the last posts garnering up to 1,000 and 2,000 comments.

The extent of the final posts can be seen on the screenshot

Nevertheless, a number of users actively opposed the account, with many advocating for a collective effort to report it in accordance with X platform’s guidelines. This push for mass reporting was characterized by a coordinated attempt to highlight the account’s violation of the platform’s rules, emphasizing the need for adherence to community standards and policies.

X user calling on suspension of the newly created account of Al-Qassam Brigades, addressing X and Elon Musk personally

The instruction in Hebrew on how to report the account posted by an user :

Despite the prompt and strategic response from X’s team to the account in question, the significant level of engagement highlights the pressing issue of how social media may contribute to the proliferation of a certain organization’s narrative. While the viewership of these posts was less than the number of followers Al-Qassam has on Telegram, they received exponentially more attention. Considering the algorithms of X that promote content circulation and recommendations, it’s plausible that a portion of the interactions came from an audience that was newly exposed to this content. The account, this time mainly used for sharing news, managed to disseminate its message to over half a million users within a day before any action was taken by the X platform. This underscores the challenge of preventing extremist groups from exploiting the open nature of social media platforms.

WNM has documented the activity and user interactions associated with the now-suspended Al-Qassam profile on the X platform.