Webinar: War, Media, and Disinformation in MENA

Amidst a sea of disinformation and media spin, the Middle East Studies Program, in collaboration with the Arab Political Science Network (APSN) and the Center for Economic, Legal, and Social Studies and Documentation (CEDEJ), hosted a webinar titled “War, Media and Disinformation” on February 24, 2025. 

The session is the second of a five-part series on “Politics and War in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)” that brings together experts who share their research, reflect on the topic of the session and engage in a discussion with attendees.

Khaled Ezzelarab, associate professor of practice and director of the Middle East Studies Program, moderated the webinar featuring insights from researchers on media in the context of the conflicts in Syria, Palestine and Sudan.

Katty Alhayek, assistant professor in the School of Professional Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University, addressed how Al Assad’s regime in Syria used disinformation as a tactic ever since the beginning of the revolution in 2011. Alhayek explained that Al Assad regime used disinformation to frame protestors as extremists who were funded by foreign countries, seeking to cripple the opposition. 

After the fall of Al Assad in December 2024, both mis- and disinformation continued to spread, explained Alhayek. Systematic media campaigns are being used to distort the truth about a variety of subjects, including human rights violations in Syrian prisons. However, Alhayek highlighted the role of fact-checking initiatives such as "Verify Syria" in helping to navigate the information chaos.

Then Wesam Amer, CARA/SRF visiting professor at Cambridge and dean of Communication and Languages at Gaza University, provided a firsthand account on the situation in Gaza. 

Criticizing mainstream Western media for misrepresenting the realities of the war on Gaza, Amer maintained that Palestinians are fighting a second war in the media, which is shaping “global perceptions, justifying actions, and influencing policy decisions.” Indeed, the framing of the conflict as a war between “Israel and Hamas”, is a distortion of the fact that Israel is conducting a war “on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank”, said Amer. 

Amer said that disinformation against Palestinians is also prevalent on social media, where leading platforms are discriminating against them, by silencing pro-Palestinian voices and allowing false Israeli narratives to spread. He also highlighted the role of AI-generated propaganda in inflaming disinformation. 

The third panel speaker, Hamid Khalafallah, PhD researcher at the Global Development Institute in the University of Manchester, emphasized that media disregards the conflict in Sudan. Khalafallah said that the "largest humanitarian crisis with almost 13 million displaced people" is largely ignored by both international and regional media. He cited statistics showing that while the wars in Ukraine and Gaza received an average of around 200,000 stories per month in 2024 among various news outlets, the figure for the conflict in Sudan was less than 1000. 

This absence of high-quality media coverage creates a vacuum that is filled by the warring parties in Sudan, who use strategic disinformation to further their agendas. Consequently, "misinformation and disinformation campaigns" harm the Sudanese people due to false news, hate speech, and encouraging civilian mobilization with no solutions to end the war, said Khalafallah.