Israel's Facebook Campaign

The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reports, "The realization that young people are increasingly living life through their Facebook accounts recently gave birth to a new and potentially powerful tool in the fight for Israel's image." A group of 23 student from Hebrew University in Jerusalem have developed a software application which allows users to use the Facebook status line "to inform hundreds of thousands of users at any given moment about positive facts about Israel".

According to the article, "Israpedia, the Facebook application, automatically replaces run-of-the-mill musings or common tidbits with what the group's staff considers interesting though little known facts about Israel, like the fact that it is the second biggest book publisher per capita in the world, or that it has over 200 wineries producing red, white and bubbly."

The application's superiority to "run-of-the-mill musings" is built-in. While "users can always override the Israpedia status line and write their own thing" such as "Taking in the views from the security fence" or "Bibi looks absolutely ravishing today", the developers explain, "If the new user-added line stays unchanged for two days, the Israpedia application will change it to an Israel fact." Their next goal is "to take the Israpedia lines and automatically turn them into messages in Twitter".

The more cynical among you might ponder this advance in social media in the same week that Israeli authorities removed any not-so-positive references to the Nakba, the 1948 displacement of Palestinians from their land and homes, in school textbooks.

I, on the other hand, will celebrate this achievement. After all, it's an improvement on January, when pro-Israeli users were destroying Facebook groups calling attention to the damage and civilian casualties caused by Israel's invasion of Gaza.