Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, a puppet master controlling various social media platforms, including Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Photo: Dissident Voice.
By Karim Bettache – Oct 7, 2025
The billionaires who bought your mind: how every platform you use now serves the Gaza genocide.
[Editor’s note: Although this article is over three weeks old, Orinoco Tribune publishes it because it considers it to be as relevant now as it was at the time of its publication.]
The corporate media’s stranglehold on truth has reached its apotheosis. What we are witnessing is not merely bias or propaganda in the traditional sense, but the complete capture of the information ecosystem by forces committed to obscuring one of the most documented genocides in human history. From Google to CBS, from the New York Times to TikTok, every major platform that shapes global consciousness now operates under the ideological umbrella of Zionist billionaires who have weaponized information itself.
The recent appointment of Barry Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, following Paramount’s $150 million acquisition of her outlet, represents more than a personnel change. It is the institutionalization of genocide denial at the highest levels of American journalism. Weiss, a self-described “fanatical Zionist,” has built her career on dismissing Palestinian suffering, including her outlet’s obscene attempt to explain away Gaza’s starvation crisis by citing “co-morbidities” among dying children. This is the voice that will now shape CBS’s coverage of international affairs.
Meanwhile, Larry Ellison, one of the world’s wealthiest individuals and the largest individual donor to the Israeli Defense Forces, has become the effective owner of TikTok in the United States. The China-originated platform that once offered glimpses of unfiltered reality from Gaza—images of dead children, demolished hospitals, and testimonies from Palestinian families—will now be curated by someone financially invested in the machinery producing those very images.
This is not coincidence. It is strategy.
It’s not Israel….It’s the Qataris! The Iranians!
Van Jones, once a Maoist organizer who understood the mechanics of oppression, now performs the role of useful idiot servant to Zio-bowss (and white man, of course) on Bill Maher’s show, blaming Iranian “misinformation” for young Americans’ revulsion at watching children being blown apart by American-funded bombs. The cognitive dissonance required for such a performance would be comical if the stakes were not so high. Jones cannot fathom that his audience might simply be responding to objective reality—that witnessing systematic slaughter tends to produce moral outrage rather than geopolitical confusion.
The machine Jones now serves has perfected the art of projection. While accusing Iran and Qatar — can you believe it? Iran and Qatar!! — of manipulating social media algorithms, Israel has allocated $145 million for its largest U.S. propaganda campaign since the genocide began. Project 545 aims for 50 million monthly impressions, with 80% targeting Gen Z on the very platforms Jones claims are compromised by foreign (ooooh, scary MUSLIM) interference. Benjamin Netanyahu himself met with American influencers on U.S. soil, offering $7,000 per social media post to sanitize his war crimes. Imagine the media response if Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin conducted such meetings.
“The Global South’s failure to develop alternative information infrastructure represents a catastrophic strategic blindness.”
The Global South’s Perplexing Media Blindness
The tragedy extends beyond American complicity. The Global South’s failure to develop alternative information infrastructure represents a catastrophic strategic blindness. China, despite understanding information sovereignty within its borders, has shown a baffling inability to project soft power internationally. The decision to sell TikTok rather than maintain an independent platform capable of challenging Western narrative dominance reveals either stunning naivety or calculated capitulation in the service of capitalist — not socialist — interests.
This surrender has consequences that extend far beyond Palestine. The anti-Muslim sentiment that pervades societies like Japan and South Korea, where Muslim populations are negligible, demonstrates the global reach of Western psychological conditioning. The fear of China that grips Southeast Asia despite China’s non-interventionist foreign policy reflects the same manufactured consciousness. These are not organic cultural phenomena but products of deliberate narrative construction.
Source.
The arithmetic of human worth tells the story most clearly. Seven hundred thousand dead Palestinians generate less sustained media attention than the death of a single racist provocateur or two British citizens. This is not accident but architecture—the careful construction of people and “unpeople” in the global consciousness. When footage emerges of Palestinian children shot by Israeli snipers with single bullets to the head and/or genitals, as multiple international doctors have testified, the response is not investigation but explanation of why such images constitute “misinformation.”
“We have allowed our enemies total control over the means of mass communication. The left’s failure to develop independent media infrastructure represents not just strategic error but moral abdication.”
“Slave, Keep Your Head Down!”
The machine depends on our isolation, our despair, our learned helplessness. It requires us to believe that nothing we do matters, that resistance is futile, that the best we can hope for is to keep our heads down and hope that it won’t be our children the billionaires gleefully select to rape or slaughter.
More than they fear a million peaceful marches, ruling classes fear us breaking the chains of “learned helplessness.” They understand that their power rests not on superior firepower but on superior narrative control. The Western empire’s greatest weapon has never been its military but its ability to shape how the world thinks.
The treatment of Greta Thunberg aboard the Gaza flotilla—forced to kiss the Israeli flag, beaten, dragged by her hair, held in cells infested with bedbugs—was part of this narrative machine. It was a message to anyone who might consider challenging the genocide: this is what happens to the most prominent among you. Imagine what we do to the rest — let alone the Palestinians.
The Enemy has Total Control Over Our Communication
Yet their desperation is showing. The need to physically assault activists, to manipulate social media algorithms, to install ideological commissars in newsrooms, suggests an empire in decline. Truth has a way of asserting itself despite the most sophisticated propaganda apparatus. Young Americans, seeing images of systematic destruction in Gaza, are not being manipulated by foreign actors—they are responding to moral clarity in a moment when their elders have lost theirs.
The path forward requires acknowledging an uncomfortable reality: we have allowed our enemies total control over the means of mass communication. The left’s failure to develop independent media infrastructure represents not just strategic error but moral abdication. We have permitted ourselves to become dependent on platforms owned by those who profit from our silence.
Building alternatives will require resources, commitment, and international coordination that the left has thus far failed to muster. It means accepting that information sovereignty is as important as economic sovereignty, that narrative independence is prerequisite to political independence. It means understanding that every day we delay is another day the genocide continues with manufactured consent.
Reclaim Reality
The machine is not invincible. It simply appears so because we have forgotten how to fight it. The first step is refusing to mistake its projections for reality, its manipulations for truth, its violence for justice. The second is building something better. The third is never, under any circumstances, allowing them to make us forget what we have seen.
The dead children of Gaza are not misinformation. They are the truth the machine cannot tolerate, and therefore the truth around which resistance must organize. Their memory demands nothing less than the complete dismantling of the apparatus that made their murder possible—and profitable.
(Substack)
Karim Bettache
Prof. Karim Bettache acquired his BSc and MSc in psychology at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and his Ph.D. in psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has worked as a postdoctoral fellow with the cultural psychologist Professor Chi-yue Chiu and as a lecturer for Monash University. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor for the Faculty of Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
He specializes in cultural, political, and social psychology. His work attempts to connect individual psychological phenomena (e.g., racism) to broader sociopolitical and historical developments of human societies (e.g., colonialism or capitalism). Hence, his work strongly overlaps with a multitude of social sciences such as sociology and the political sciences.
