‘Thirst Trap’ Sexualised Propaganda by IDF Soldiers in the Gaza War

The final AoIR 2024 conference panel that I’m attending today is on ambient amplification, and starts with an introduction by Marloes Annette Geboers and Elena Pilipets, who introduce foregrounding of the background, platforms and Web environments, embodiment and materiality, modulation of attention and affect, and more or less coordinated engagement as they key dimensions of such ambient amplification. The first presenter, however, is Marcus Bösch, whose interest is in the use of ‘thirst trap’ images: sexualised photos that seek to attract male attention.

Recently, for instance, young female Israeli Defence Force soldiers were posting such images in the context of the war in Gaza, showing themselves posing in uniform in dance videos shot on the beaches of Gaza in their TikTok videos. Some of this continues strategies of “horizontal, hip, and hysterical” posting of content that seeks to combat Anti-Semitism. In earlier cases, the IDF had removed such videos from YouTube and disciplined soldiers for posting them; more recently, however, it has actively encouraged and rewarded such content on TikTok.

Similar such videos had also been seen in the context of the war on Ukraine, and using TikTok’s content remixing and reuse affordances IDF soldiers built on these formats. But there is now also a wave of very similar videos that are clearly computationally manipulated and seem to link to a domain in Russia. While these videos may be simply exploitative entrapment, the broader range of such content can clearly be understood as participatory propaganda.