Tracing the flow of anti-Israel propaganda on social media, Ashley Rindsberg finds that a great deal of it comes from a close network of anonymous accounts with direct ties to terrorist groups. Much of this material originates on Reddit, a website where user-moderated communities (“subreddits”) share and discuss links, images, and so forth, and on Discord, a social site used primarily by video-game enthusiasts. Reddit—whose stock is traded on Wall Street—is often the conduit through which content passes from the darker corners of the Internet to mainstream social-media sites like Facebook and X. Rindsberg explains:

Since October 7, an online network has emerged that directs content sourced from U.S.-designated Islamist terror organizations—including Hamas, Hizballah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthi movement—across Reddit, Discord, X, TikTok, Instagram, Quora, and Wikipedia. The network works with an awareness that its manipulation eventually flows downstream and gets baked into universal platforms like Google search and ChatGPT.

Much of the network’s influence lies in popular subreddits that, nominally, have nothing to do with Israel. For example, u/Sabbah, the highly influential member of the network mentioned previously, moderates topically relevant subreddits like r/Palestine, [but also] r/Documentaries, r/therewasanattempt, r/PublicFreakout, r/IRLEasterEggs, r/ToiletPaperUSA—unrelated, large subreddits that have been captured by the network.

The promotion of content from foreign terror organizations on Reddit, including by top moderators, raises serious legal concerns. U.S. “material-support” laws prohibit aiding terror entities, including spreading propaganda, training guides, or recruitment tools—forms of speech not protected by the First Amendment.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.