By Howie Silbiger
The recent wave of false reports claiming that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been killed did not last long. It was debunked quickly, the videos came out, and within hours the story collapsed. On the surface, it looks like just another internet rumour that came and went.
It was not.
What we witnessed was a textbook example of how information warfare now operates, and more importantly, how easily it is being deployed against Israel and, by extension, against Jews everywhere.
This was not a misunderstanding. It followed a pattern that has become increasingly familiar, especially in conflicts involving Israel, where traditional media, social media, and politically motivated networks all collide.
The first stage is seeding. A piece of information is dropped into the ecosystem from the edges, through accounts or outlets that are not fully credible but not completely dismissible either. The claim is always dramatic. A leader is dead. A government has collapsed. A military has suffered a catastrophic blow. The goal is not to prove anything. The goal is to get it into circulation.
Then comes amplification. Social media does what it does best. People begin sharing the claim, often adding words like “unconfirmed” or “reports are emerging.” That language gives people cover, but it also fuels the spread. The platforms reward speed, not accuracy, and anything that feels urgent or shocking gets pushed further and faster than anything grounded in fact.
From there, repetition takes over. The more people see something, the more real it starts to feel. It appears everywhere, across platforms, across languages, across networks, until the sheer volume of the claim begins to replace the need for evidence. At that point, the average person is no longer asking if it is true. They are asking how it could not be.
And then we arrive at the most dangerous stage, something relatively new: reflexive skepticism.
When the corrections come, when videos are released, when officials respond, it no longer settles the issue. Instead, the denial becomes part of the story. People question the footage. They look for glitches. They assume manipulation. In the Netanyahu case, even clear video evidence was picked apart and dismissed by people who had already decided that nothing could be trusted.
This is where the system breaks down completely.
We are now in a reality where the existence of deepfakes and synthetic media has not made people more careful. It has made them more cynical. Real evidence and fake evidence now live in the same space, and for many people, they carry the same weight.
We have seen this before. In the early days of the war in Ukraine, false reports that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had fled or been killed spread widely before being disproven. In the Middle East, rumours of assassinations and regime collapses surface regularly and gain traction before facts can catch up. During COVID, we watched unverified claims about governments and public health data spread with the same structure and the same results.
The pattern does not change. Insert the claim. Amplify it. Repeat it until it feels real. Then undermine any attempt to correct it.
But when it comes to Israel, and increasingly when it comes to anything involving Jews, this process takes on a different weight. It is not just about confusion. It is about narrative. It is about how quickly the world is willing to believe the worst possible version of events when Jews are involved, and how reluctant it is to walk that belief back once the facts catch up.
The objective is not always to make people believe one specific lie. It is something more corrosive than that. It is to make people stop believing anything at all. Because once the information environment collapses, once facts, denials, and fabrications all carry the same credibility, institutions lose their ability to communicate, and truth becomes just another opinion.
The Netanyahu rumour, as ridiculous as it was, proved how quickly and easy a rumor can spread, how readily it was believed, and how resistant it was to being corrected.
That is not a glitch in the system; That is the system.
By the time the truth caught up, the story had already done what it was meant to do. Millions had seen it, shared it, and in many cases believed it without hesitation. That is the real problem. In an environment where anything involving Israel is instantly magnified and rarely questioned, false narratives do not just spread, they take root. And once they do, no correction, no clarification, no quiet retraction ever reaches as far as the lie.
Howie Silbiger is the host of The Howie Silbiger Show on Truetalkradio.com and Political Hitman on Israelnewstalkradio.com. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Montreal Jewish News.
