Filling the Gaza Info Gap
Three Chinese-language social media accounts pushing back against dominant media narratives about Israel and Palestine.
Since October, Chinese-language social media accounts have sought to fill a yawning information gap on Israel’s war on Gaza. Some of these are large, complex operations with teams of volunteers who have been able to maintain their posting momentum for months. For Lingua Sinica, freelance journalist Jordyn Haime profiles three of these accounts and the people behind them — what motivates their work, how they’re organizing online and off, and why they’re working against popular perceptions to promote solidarity in unlikely places.
In October, shortly after Israel launched Operation Swords of Iron against Hamas in Gaza, a group of strangers met in a Taipei park. They represented a wide diversity of backgrounds: from Taiwanese activists and organizers to Israeli and Palestinian residents in Taiwan, from professional translators to high school and college students. But all were bound by shared concern over the growing number of casualties in the Gaza Strip and the relative silence from Taiwanese media.
The result was For Peace Taiwan (可以自由巴), a group of about 20 people sharing information about and advocating for Palestine. That includes translation work on social media, but also advocacy, protest organizing, outreach to local media, and the curation of Chinese-language resources on the history of Israel and Palestine.
The account’s organizers say their work is a necessary response to the significant gap in Taiwanese media coverage of the crisis in Gaza. It’s also part of the wide landscape of multilingual information on the Gaza crisis that has found a home on Instagram — including the work of many Palestinian journalists offering on-the-ground coverage as most foreign journalists have been denied access to the strip. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 90 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 7, with several others injured, missing, or arrested.
Repackaged Reporting
“We're all concerned that the media in Taiwan usually takes from Western sources that are pro-Zionist and quite biased towards Israel,” says Huang Pin-tsun, a Taiwan-born master’s student based in New Zealand who volunteers as a translator at For Peace Taiwan. “So one of the things we considered was that we could translate sources that are not biased towards Israel — and uplift Palestinian voices through translation, because there's a big lack of Palestinian voices being represented in the local media in Taiwan.”
The content on FPT’s account ranges from translations of poems and illustrated slideshows to video clips from interviews with Palestinians, like Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Aziza’s interview with Al Jazeera shortly after he left the Gaza Strip in January.
Interviewees running three Gaza-focused social media accounts say the lack of Palestinian perspectives, high levels of misinformation about the war, and missteps in Western coverage as motivations for their work. They cite, for example, the unverified claim of the beheading of 40 babies during the October 7 attack, and The New York Times’ reporting on alleged “systematic rape” by Hamas, claims that some outlets have said lack evidence. A January analysis by The Intercept of coverage by major media outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, alleged that "major newspapers skewed their coverage toward Israeli narratives,” leading to widespread bias. For example, as Palestinian deaths increased, mentions of Palestinians declined. All three described rigorous processes of sourcing reputable news, translating, and fact-checking all their posts.
Western media coverage of the war matters in Taiwan because Taiwanese media draws heavily from Western sources, often producing stories that simply summarize foreign media reports — re-topped with more sensational headlines and language to appeal to local audiences.
In December, in a sign of potential bias closer to home for Taiwanese, Maya Yaron, Israel’s representative to Taiwan, proposed a media sharing initiative between Taiwanese and Israeli outlets such as i24 and the Jerusalem Post to provide information that is “more authentic about what is really happening on the ground.”
Seeing Taiwan in the Middle East
Politics and identity also play a role in mainstream media portrayals of the war. Popular media often play up surface-level comparisons of Taiwan and Israel as successful “islands of democracy” surrounded by hostile neighbors, and ask how Taiwan can become more like Israel on matters like defense and international diplomacy. Just days after Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense created a task force to learn from the ongoing war.
Popular media often play up surface-level comparisons of Taiwan and Israel as successful “islands of democracy” surrounded by hostile neighbors.
“I think Taiwanese people really like to compare themselves with others, especially with strong countries,” says Shamsa, a 17-year-old high school student from Taiwan’s high-tech hub of Hsinchu who started the FPT account. “Israel is not the only one. Singapore is the one that we usually talk about.” (We are omitting Shamsa’s last name because she is a minor).
“The most common thing I see is, ‘Why can [that country] do that and we can’t?’ I think the comparison is more like a tool,” she says.
Comparisons between Jews and Chinese date back to the early 20th century, when they were used as inspiration for a new Chinese nation. Writers like Liang Qichao (梁啟超), the political activist and intellectual who had a marked influence on China in the early 20th century, looked at the perceived power of Jews in the United States — despite their centuries of oppression — and found hope for their own nation. Having fled to Taiwan with his Kuomintang (KMT) remnants in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) felt a similar sense of admiration as he watched Israel win war after war against its larger neighbors, and dreamed of himself retaking the Chinese mainland.
In the context of present-day Taiwanese politics, commentators on the independence-leaning “pan-green” side, associated with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), often see Israel as a positive example of an identity and state-building project. Huang Wenju (黃文局), a longtime financial backer of the pan-greens and the founder of nonprofit organizations like the Taiwan Inspiration Association and the policy-focused Global Taiwan Institute, calls himself a “Jewish historian” and has written dozens of opinion pieces about Israel and the Jews. Popular media coverage and articles like Huang’s that discuss these ideas are often tinged with stereotypes about innate Jewish business sense or Jewish dominance over Western institutions.
These perceived similarities have become useful talking points for both Taiwanese and Israelis in diplomacy. Taiwan has more explicitly expressed interest in cooperating with Israel on defense in the past few years, especially as ties between Israel and China sour. Aid packages from the United States that lump Taiwan, Ukraine, and Israel together as democracies fighting for their existence only underline these analogies. China has also taken advantage of this as a narrative vulnerability and incorporated Israel into its web of US-skeptic misinformation disseminated in Taiwan.
Shamsa, however, sees more similarities between Taiwan and Palestine, comparing Israel’s suppression of Palestinians to the White Terror, the 40-year period of martial law under the KMT that killed thousands.
Shamsa, who is Muslim, says she initially started the account last summer at the encouragement of her mother and teacher after Israel and Palestine were raised in her history class. When her teacher played the documentary Promises, which looks at the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through the perspectives of children in both communities, “the classmates next to me were watching and laughing. They were watching it as a comedy,” she says. Shortly after that experience, Israel launched a military operation against the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank that forced thousands of Palestinians to flee.
“As usual, many Taiwanese media turned to the mainstream Western views,” Shamsa says. “I felt very angry. They had double standards: Russia's attack on Ukraine was ‘completely evil,’ but Israel's bombing of hospitals and refugee camps was ‘legitimate defense.’”
Beyond Translation
With so many competing views and so much context to grapple with, this is a difficult information environment for grassroots and independent media to tackle. But that environment also directly informs how they should introduce Israel and Palestine to their audiences while ensuring editorial independence. Trust in the media in Taiwan is already low — with just 28 percent of people saying they trust the news, according to the Reuters Institute. More and more young people have instead been turning to YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram for information.
Instagram-first Almost is a response to these trends. Founded by Kassy Cho in 2020, Almost’s Mandarin-language account began covering news from Israel and Palestine long before October 7. Cho explains that reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza means not just translating news but also adapting it to fill in knowledge gaps for a Taiwanese audience, which are often identified based on questions left in the comment sections on their posts or through direct interactions with followers. “We adopted a very audience-first approach, because we have an English account as well, where we are also covering this war very extensively. But the content is very different,” Cho says.
The approach at Almost, says Cho, requires frequent interaction with the audience, which can help cut through the confusion for Chinese-language audiences that are less familiar with key context. “Very early on, we had a lot of comments, and people were just very confused in general,” she explains. The solution was to embed additional educational resources into the Chinese content.
“That's why we spend a lot of time re-writing, and re-phrasing our Chinese headlines. It could be very straightforward in English but sometimes, in Chinese, we have to spend a lot of time explaining certain concepts, explaining history and the power structures that exist,” says Cho.
Reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza means not just translating news, but adapting it to fill in knowledge gaps for a Taiwanese audience
Many other Sinophone social media accounts dedicated to translating Gaza have also sprung up on Instagram in the past few months, creating a collaborative ecosystem of shared translations and resources. Gaze 4 Gaza compiles news about Gaza with a focus on culture; a group of anonymous activists behind The Insecurity League (不安全陣線) curate on-the-ground stories and up-to-date figures and statistics in sharable infographics; and well-established human rights-focused accounts like Northern Square (北方广场) have also begun incorporating Gaza into their regular posts. Although many have small followings, collaboration has widened their reach.
“Solidarity is not Transactional”
FPT has worked particularly closely with the Palestine Solidarity Action Network (巴勒斯坦团结行动网络). Using simplified Chinese, the account has focused on the PRC’s complicity in Israel’s decades-long repression of Palestinians, hoping to show how “struggles against colonialism are connected,” according to account managers, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons.
Its primary initiative has been sharing information about and leading boycott efforts against Hikvision, the Chinese surveillance camera company whose cameras have been used to surveil Palestinians in the West Bank and are connected to human rights abuses, according to Amnesty International.
Speaking via email, those behind the initiative say they are a group of Sinophone activists spanning continents and organizing spaces, and that their audience comprises people in North America and Europe who may or may not be Mandarin speakers. Many resources the account shares are presented bilingually in Chinese and English.
“We want to put out the message that even though the Chinese government acknowledges the rights of Palestinian people and has been calling for a ceasefire since the genocide began, they can actively do more. It’s on us to pressure them to do more,” the group says.
Palestine Solidarity Action Network’s resources for boycotting the Chinese surveillance equipment maker Hikvision have crossed borders and oceans, appearing in protests across North America, Taiwan, and Malaysia. Its petition against Hikvision has received thousands of signatures and has been endorsed by many of the accounts mentioned here as well as other groups around the world, from Indonesia to Canada to the Netherlands.
“We don't have to align ourselves with the official narrative of our state.”
This small but growing network of collaboration may not yet be shifting the global story on Gaza, but it shatters standard narratives about a world polarized by the confrontation between a monolithic East and West, of neat lines dividing the China-led Global South and the US-led Global North.
“Solidarity is not transactional. That's always on my mind — that campist politics is very unhelpful,” says Huang, the New Zealand-based For Peace Taiwan volunteer. “We don't have to align ourselves with the official narrative of our state to recognize that there is a genocide happening to innocent civilians in Palestine.”
Jordyn Haime is a freelance journalist based in Taipei, Taiwan writing about Taiwanese democracy and society and Jewish affairs in Asia. Her work has appeared in The China Project, Al Jazeera, Haaretz, The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and more.