TEHRAN — Picture a hush in a room. A nervous voice leans into a mic and admits what everyone has felt: “We have a major, major, major generational problem.” That leaked fragment was less an accusation than a diagnosis: the old pipelines of influence were cracking as short, brutal images poured into young people’s feeds.

Act I — The confession

Obtained and circulated by the Tehran Times in late 2023, after Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza, the confession of the Israel Lobby’s Anti-Defamation League chief, Jonathan Greenblatt, crystallized a new truth.

In the age of the smartphone and social media, message control is no longer a door you can simply shut.

“We really have a TikTok problem,” he admitted — a rare acknowledgment that the old levers of narrative dominance were faltering in real time.

Act II — When footage changed the moral math

What followed was a collision, not persuasion. Gaza’s devastation arrived as helmet cams, phone videos, and viral clips — sometimes uploaded by Israeli soldiers themselves — made the arithmetic of death immediate.

For a generation raised on feeds, actions outweighed press releases; seeing was believing. The consequence was measurable: polls recorded sharp declines in favorable views of Israel and rising shares of Americans saying the government had gone too far.

Young voters, no longer tethered to curated narratives from newspapers, television, or sermon halls, recalibrated their consciences in real time. The Palestinian cause — a sidebar before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood — had returned to the center of Western attention.

Act III — The blitz, the blunt force, and the backfire

The PR machine responded with sophisticated brute force: influencer contracts, geofenced ads targeting sympathetic audiences, paid posts, rapid-response op-eds, and tools designed to shape algorithmic flows.

Where persuasion faltered, pressure followed — donors threatening universities, trustees pressing presidents, and public campaigns that misleadingly equated critique of Israel with antisemitism.

Atrocity claims — lurid stories that circulated in the immediate aftermath of October 7, including fabricated tales of murdered infants, sexual violence, and the refrain that “Hamas is ISIS” — were used to manufacture public consent through fear and outrage.

In the short term, the campaign bent headlines and chilled campuses; in the medium term, fact-checking and relentless scrutiny hollowed parts of the offensive and, perversely, amplified the protests it sought to silence.

Politics followed the feeds. Progressive candidates such as Zohran Mamdani in New York City, who embraced Palestinian solidarity, surged in primaries.

On the right, anti-establishment figures like Nick Fuentes rose from the fringes into wider visibility, while others, such as Candace Owens, found common cause with noninterventionists questioning the costs of unconditional support.

Even more influential than before, Tucker Carlson emerged as a leading critic of Israel, denouncing civilian bombings, questioning U.S. aid, and exposing Benjamin Netanyahu’s influence in Washington.

What had once been taboo was now central to debate — actions had changed the story, and while propaganda could still roar, it no longer carried unquestioned authority.

Act IV — Technofeudalism and what cannot be undone

The present scene is stark. War criminals such as Netanyahu publicly describe social media as “a weapon”; influencers are being courted as if they are flank battalions.

High-profile media moves and acquisitions by wealthy tech figures such as Bibi’s friend Larry Ellison — along with the appointment of hardcore Zionist figures like Bari Weiss in major media outlets — have stoked fears of concentrated narrative power and foreign influence.

Digital playbooks have evolved into cognitive warfare: geo-fencing Christian Zionist churches with pro-Israel ads, AI-driven content pushes, and paid influencer networks designed to reach specific communities and feeds.

Platforms such as the newly-acquired TikTok throttle Palestinian content; algorithms and moderation policies became battlefields.

On the ground, policing has hardened around dissent: National Guard deployments to blue states, masked arrest squads, expanded surveillance authorities, and covert operations have become blunt instruments to suppress protest.

Taken together with billionaire control over media and algorithms, these dynamics reveal the outlines of a new technofeudal age — where power may own the story, but never the memory.

However loud the machinery of persuasion, propaganda can only roar while testimony endures. Silence may be purchased, but belief resists the sale.

You can’t unring the bell. The feeds have shifted the moral ledger — and the echo will not fade.