Updating our Israel/Gaza analysis 2 Years On

By Elizabeth Radway and Laura Edelson

Introduction

Before the second anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks, we wanted to revisit our original TikTok data to see how discussion around the Israel–Gaza conflict has evolved. We followed the same general methodology as in our first analysis, using TikTok’s Research API to collect videos tagged with pro-Israel and pro-Palestine hashtags for the week of September 2nd through September 10th. We made some changes to the hashtags used in response to semantic drift, and a complete description of our updated data collection process appears in the methodology section at the end of this post.

At a high level, the ratio of pro-Israel to pro-Palestine content has remained very similar as in our original analysis. Currently, roughly one pro-Israel post appeared for about every seventeen pro-Palestine posts, as opposed to one for every twenty we found two years ago. In other words, the balance of content creation on TikTok has barely shifted. The average pro-Palestine video received about 11,500 views, compared with roughly 2,400 for pro-Israel videos — a difference of nearly five-to-one. But averages can be deceptive. The median pro-Palestine video had only 472 views, while the median pro-Israel video had 565 views. This is because of how skewed the pro-Palestine distribution has become: a few posts attract enormous audiences, pulling the average upward, while the typical post performs much more modestly.

Engagement patterns are similar. We generally prefer to look at engagement on a per-view rather than a per-post basis, because we think that engagement is best thought of as a reaction to a view. Every time a user views a piece of content, there is a chance they will react to it. On average, pro-Palestine videos earned higher likes and shares per view (12.6 and 0.2 per hundred, respectively) than pro-Israel videos (8.5 and .1 per hundred). Comments tell a more mixed story with pro-Palestine and pro-Israel videos receiving very similar comments per post (.8 vs. .5 per hundred). Both sides, though, show that discussion is concentrated in a small number of highly visible videos.

This may be obvious to folks who use TikTok, but for those who do not, it is worth saying that pro-Israel and pro-Palestine content appear to be strongly siloed and not in dialogue with one another. One way of observing this is that there are almost no videos with both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine hashtags in our dataset. The small number that did appear appeared to all be hashtag farming, to the extent that we used this as an exclusion criteria in our data cleaning process. The videos in question sometimes speak to an imagined opponent on the other side of the conflict, but they do not appear to actually talk to one another. This doesn’t mean that users only see one type of content or the other; our data can’t tell us that. However, social media is sometimes held up as a place for users to be in dialogue with one another about important topics, and that is not what we see here. Instead, these two ‘sides’ of a topic are better thought of as separate topics.

So what is in pro-Israel and pro-Palestine content, anyway?

To understand what all this content looked like, we viewed the top twenty videos categorized as pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. Content categorized as pro-Israel or pro-Palestine oftentimes was more adjacent to, rather than directly engaging in discussions of Israel and Palestine. 

Pro-Israel content in our dataset seemed to exist within a zeitgeisty community of Jewish Zionists. Top pro-Israel content mainly included discussions of incidents of antisemitism and short, entertainment-oriented responses towards critiques of Israel. Most of this content was not directly referential to Israel or Palestine. For instance, out of the top twenty pro-Israel videos, only eight directly or indirectly referenced support for Israel. Additionally, two of the top twenty pro-Israel videos were incorrectly categorized, using the #israel hashtag in reference to Jewish anti-zionism. 

Pro-Palestine content in our dataset tended to be medium-length content that seemed to aim towards a larger audience with a common focus on Palestine. This content largely acted as an alternative news source for ongoing events in Gaza and a place of mourning for slain Gazans, in addition to typical TikTok content (such as dance videos and cancel-culture discussions) that incorporated Palestinian creators or cultural references. For instance, six of the top twenty pro-Palestine videos centered on coverage or discussion of recent news (namely the Gaza City evacuation order and the expulsion of pro-Palestine US Veteran protestors from a US Senate hearing). Four of the top twenty pro-Palestine videos aimed at mourning and compassion towards Gazan children.

Comparing Public Opinion Among Young Americans

TikTok’s user base skews young, so it’s worth asking how these patterns line up with the attitudes of younger Americans toward the conflict. According to Pew Research Polling from April of 2025, 50% of Republicans under 50 now say they have a negative view of Israel, while 71% of Democrats under 50 say the same. Both of these figures were much lower in 2022. A rise in negative sentiment towards Israel was found for all age groups, but younger adults consistently have more negative views of Israel than older cohorts. Do. A more recent study from Brookings corroborates this and found that across party lines, young Americans have become markedly more critical of the Israeli government and more sympathetic to Palestinian civilians. These shifts don’t directly determine what goes viral on TikTok, but they may help explain why there is more pro-Palestine posting activity, and the platform’s most popular posts on the topic continue to lean heavily toward pro-Palestine narratives: the audience most likely to engage with that content also happens to be the age group most skeptical of Israel’s actions.

Methodology

Similar to our work last year, we used the TikTok Research API to collect data on a set of pro-Israel and pro-Palestine hashtags. We derived a new set of hashtags to identify Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestine content, as shown below:

Pro-Palestine: 

#FreePalestine, #Palestine, #StandWithPalestine, #GazaUnderAttack, #CeasefireNow, #StrikeForGaza, #BDS, #FromtheRiverToTheSea, #PalestineWillBeFree #palestinianlivesmatter

Pro-Israel:

#StandWithIsrael #IStandWithIsrael  #BringThemHome, #AmIsraelChai #NeverForget #bringthemhomenow #antisemitism #jewishpride #stopantisemitism