Analysing Hizbullah Propaganda Strategies on Telegram and TV

And the afternoon session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with Tamer Farag, whose focus is on the communication strategies of Hizbullah in the polarised Lebanese media system (before the current escalation of violence in the region). Over the past decades, we’ve moved from optimism to pessimism about the role of social media in political communication, with plenty of evidence on the problematic uses of social media by autocratic regimes and anti-democratic groups.

But the understanding of social media communication also requires a perception of the local context: in a region beset with civil and other wars, all of this might unfold somewhat differently from what such research tells us. What is critical about Hizbullah, for instance, is that it is not a state or state actor; it might be understood as a social movement or a terrorist organisation, and in the Lebanese context mostly represents a social movement, which also draws on digital propaganda for its communication and engages with the specific Lebanese media system.

Lebanon’s media system has low state intervention, high political parallelism, low professionalism, and a low press market. The state as an institution is very weak; sectarian groups have political power and control the media. Hizbullah has navigated this context effectively to gain discursive power, capitalising on its material power, and to intimidate its opponents. All of this has also been against two major conflict faultlines: between Sunni and Shi’ites, and between Arabs and Israelis.

Tamer studied this by scraping six Hizbullah-associated Telegram channels: two media and two militarised channels, between September 2019 and January 2023; he applied BERTopic structural topic modelling to these data, though this is complicated by the lack of advanced topic modelling approaches for Arabic. He extracted the major topics over time, identified the main news broadcasts included here, and examined the major frames represented here. Major topics on the media channels dealt with protests at the Al-Aksa mosque, as well as various other flashpoints outside of Lebanon; the militarised channels are strongly focussed on the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

As for videos from Hizbullah’s TV channel Al-Manar, Lebanese-focussed news framed the last elections as a referendum on the American project in Lebanon; strategically weaponised conspiracy theories; framed the 2019 revolution as a conspiracy on behalf of Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the USA; built a collective memory of the civil war.

Palestinian-focussed news framed Israel as losing; targetted Sunni states that were normalising relationships with Israel; argued that armed resistance is the only solution; positioned Iran as the leader of the axis against Israel; and framed the other Lebanese political groups as allies of Israel. News on the Russian war against Ukraine positioned the West as an aggressor which will forsake its allies; this resonates with narratives in Lebanon that the West has forsaken it too.

Such framings capitalise on regional proximity, and Telegram channels play a critical role in disseminating such frames. Israel always serves as a benchmark for conspiracy theories against its supposed Lebanese allies, and there is a synergy and division of labour between the online and offline propaganda pushed by Hizbullah across its channels.

There is therefore a need to look more closely at digital propaganda in the Global South, and this comes with substantial linguistic challenges. We must also better understand the digital propaganda of non-state actors, and the asymmetric conflict between state and non-state actors (where digital media may provide non-state actors with a notable advantage).