How fake news on Israel-Hamas stokes outrage, hatred and ‘potential for violence’ on Southeast Asian TikTok

The dominant social media app provides information “recorded live or posted by individuals who are actually on the ground”, said Mr Aliff.

The clip’s caption, in Hebrew, said Palestinian militant group Hamas was to blame, and contained the hashtag #freeisrael. “For me, a general rule of thumb is to never 100 per cent believe anything on social media regardless of the platform, especially with all the artificial intelligence tools ,” said Mr Aliff.

Their intentions might start off benign, but experts warned it could lead to real-world consequences such as the rousing of emotionally charged sentiments and flashpoints among religiously diverse groups. An annual report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that nearly a quarter of Malaysians turn to TikTok for news, up nine percentage points from the previous year; while 22 per cent of Indonesians do so, in an increase of six percentage points.

Meanwhile, the proportions of people in the three countries using services like Facebook and Twitter – before it changed its name to X – for news have been declining. For this article, a CNA journalist in Singapore created a TikTok account and used it just to watch and “like” content related to the Israel-Hamas war. Search terms like “Palestine”, “Israel” and “Israel-Hamas war updates” were used, and initially yielded videos from established media outlets like CNN and Sky News.

Elsewhere, a TikTok profile named War News posted a video – still up online – purportedly showing Gaza being bombed by Israel at night. Multiple commenters have since corroborated the footage to be of the US attacking Iraq 20 years ago. “From our observations, misinformation and disinformation on the conflict largely originates from outside Singapore,” the spokesperson said. “In Singapore, we have observed that members of the public are often only reposting content related to the conflict, rather than creating it.”

The video he posted included a screenshot of an X post claiming a top Israeli general had been captured by Hamas. But this was debunked by news agency Associated Press, which reported that the general had been spotted in both a photo and video of top Israeli military officials in discussion.Malaysia-based TikTok accounts have also shared inaccurate information on the Israel-Hamas war.

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