Adam Johnson writes about the CBS “60 Minutes” interview with Netanyahu on Sunday night: “It’s even more softball than you can imagine: No mention of Netanyahu’s ICC warrant, no mention of the 20,000+ dead children, no mention of 200+ journalists killed, 60 Mins props up conspiracy theory outrage over Gaza is driven by foreign bots; no mention of ‘Palestinians’ at all.”
Netanyahu claimed: “There’s been a concerted effort by several states to basically vilify Israel in the social, primarily in the social media, and in the standard media too … We’ve not fought back yet; so we’ll have to do that.” Meanwhile, Ryan Grim has noted that Nikita Bier, Head of Product at X, has “un-verified a bunch of Iranian government accounts.”
CBS is owned by the Ellison family, which also now controls TikTok in the U.S.
OMAR ZAHZAH, [email protected], @dromarzahzah Zahzah is author of Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle. He is assistant professor of Arab, Muslim, Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies at San Francisco State University and was featured on the IPA news release “‘Shadow President’ Larry Ellison: Targeting Media and Gaza.”
Zahzah noted the irony of Netanyahu’s complaint about online media, highlighting that “as of August 2025, DropSite News reported there are ‘over 1,400 current and former members of Unit 8200, Israeli Military Intelligence, and the Israeli Defense Forces Cyber Defense Directorate now working for major Silicon Valley companies’ including CISCO, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Intel, Google, and more. In November 2024, MintPress News reported that TikTok hired ‘a myriad’ of Unit 8200 veterans. In July of 2025, the company hired Erica Mindel, who formerly served as an instructor in the IDF’s Spokespersons Unit, as a hate speech manager, according to Palestine Chronicle. The Spokesperson’s Unit is best understood as an elaborate propaganda wing of the IDF. Nate Bear reports that Meta employs ‘more than one hundred former Israeli spies and IDF soldiers,’ including its current AI Policy Chief, Shira Anderson. (Anderson, Bear explains, is an American lawyer who voluntarily enlisted in the IDF in 2009 under the Garin Tzabar program.)”
Zahzah added: “There are similar connections in legacy media. Alan MacLeod reported in ‘Revealed: The Israeli Spies Writing America’s News’ that Unit 8200 veteran Barak Ravid [political analyst for CNN and reporter for Axios] Israeli-spy-turned-journalist is not unique, as multiple prominent U.S. legacy media outlets have a track record of hiring former Israeli officials. CNN has a ‘penchant for hiring Israeli state figures,’ which the New York Times also showed through its hiring of ex-Israeli Air Force intelligence officer Anat Scwartz, author of the debunked atrocity propaganda piece ‘Screams Without Words.’”
See IPA news release from 2021: “Facebook Collaboration with Israeli Military ‘Beyond Outrageous.’“