Israel-Palestine: the photo of little Gregory hijacked on the web

on Friday May 21, 2021, the photo of little Grégory Villemin, whose body was found lifeless in Vologne in 1984, was the subject of an unexpected deception on social networks, in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The fake Houria Tah Twitter account, which has since been deleted, published a message denouncing the death of a child named Ismail Ashur, “drowned by the occupying army”. And to castigate: “No Zionist media will relay the information. A tweet punctuated by the hashtags #GazaUnderAttack and #IsraelTerrorists, reports The Parisian. To illustrate this post, the famous image of little Gregory was used, triggering a wave of taunts on the blue bird social network. Enough to trigger, too, anti-Hamas attacks on the Web.

Behind this trumped-up fake news are in fact pro-Israelis. By stumbling upon the Facebook account “Neurchi of uninhibited Zionism”, Internet users understood that this was a hoax. “We’re going to see how far their bullshit goes. Objective: 2,000 retweets ”, was it written in a conversation between the members of the group. The goal: to create fake news to make fun of the opposing camp, specifies The Parisian.

This kind of deception is not new. “The misappropriation of images to produce false information, that has always existed”, underlines Aurélie Aubert, lecturer at Paris VIII, in information and communication sciences, questioned by our colleagues. Before continuing: “This is the principle of propaganda. It’s more visible than before, with new editing techniques, it’s easier to manipulate an image than before. Anyone can do this quite easily. ”