In 1995, First Lady Hillary Clinton spoke at a United Nations conference about women’s rights, declaring, “If women are free from violence, their families will flourish.”
In 2025, a UN Women report concluded that “more than 28,000 women and girls have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the war in October 2023 – that is one woman and one girl on average killed every hour in attacks by Israeli forces. Among those killed, thousands were mothers, leaving behind devastated children, families, and communities.” These Palestinian women are not free from violence, and their families are not flourishing.
But Hillary Clinton seems to think it’s just made up.
That’s basically what she said Tuesday at a summit hosted by the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom in New York City. Clinton asked, “Smart, well-educated, young people from our own country, from around the world, where were they getting their information? They were getting their information from social media, particularly TikTok.”
For Clinton, this is a problem.
She claimed to have tried to “engage in some kind of reasonable discussion” with young people about the Israel–Palestine conflict, while never being specific about who, but said she found it “very difficult because they did not know history, they had very little context, and what they were being told on social media was not just one-sided, it was pure propaganda.”
Clinton continued, “It’s not just the usual suspects.” She was not clear about who “the usual suspects” might be.
“It’s a lot of young Jewish-Americans who don’t know the history and don’t understand,” Clinton said. “A lot of the challenge is with younger people. More than 50 percent of young people in America get their news from social media.”
“They are seeing short-form videos, some of them totally made up, some of them not at all representing what they claim to be showing, and that’s where they get their information,” she said.
Clinton’s not wrong. In 1995, most people got their information from newspapers and television. Thirty years later, internet social media rivals, or in some cases has even supplanted, legacy media.
A lot of content on the internet is AI or simply not real. But also gone are Clinton’s wistful days when administrations could just fabricate myths about Saddam Hussein having WMDs to start wars—or when presidential campaigns could feed propaganda to news outlets about Donald Trump colluding with Russia to win elections—with few ways to challenge such disinformation.
No, nowadays, everyday people can just share stuff—including images of “one woman and one girl on average killed every hour in attacks by Israeli forces.” At that speed, there must be plenty of legitimate violent images shared on TikTok and elsewhere, not to mention so many other deaths that were never captured or shared.
People definitely shared stuff about Clinton.
Tommy Vietor, the former Obama spokesman and podcaster, said of Clinton’s remarks, “A lot of Israel’s defenders soothe themselves with this argument that the problem is just social media/news diet.”
He continued, “I’d urge them to think about how patronizing this sounds to people of all ages who were sincerely upset and angry about the very real, documented bloodshed in Gaza.”
Mia Brett, an academic who specializes in “antisemitism and racism in the law,” shared Clinton’s remarks and suggested that the former senator was ignoring an important generation gap. “Jews know our own history,” Brett said. “We are told it from the time we’re toddlers.”
“The ‘young’ Jews turning away from Israel are approaching 40,” she wrote. “Jewish academic experts are more likely to call what’s happening a genocide.”
“Non Jews need to stop speaking for us,” Brett added.
Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign co-chairwoman Nina Turner took issue with Clinton saying that some younger Jews don’t understand history. “This implies that there is some sort of history that would make it ok to bomb children,” she wrote.
The progressive pundit Briahna Joy Gray shared the comments and declared, “Disavowing the Clintons should be a litmus test for any 2028 candidate.”
Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, had a crystal clear response to Clinton. “I’m nearly 50. I don’t use TikTok. I listen to NPR Morning Edition and read the Financial Times daily,” Williams wrote.
“I’m a lawyer who has worked on Israel-Palestine issues for the last 20 years,” he continued. “The evidence I’ve seen that Israel committed atrocities including genocide in Gaza is overwhelming.”
It is overwhelming. The massive propaganda campaign by Western elites like Clinton to simply pretend that widespread carnage in Gaza is not happening is more stupefying than anything she claims is being fabricated on social media.
Yes, Hillary Clinton, how information is shared in 2025 is more democratic, for good or ill. Yes, not all of what you find on the internet is real. Yes, Hamas terrorized Israel on October 7, 2023, and a response was in order.
And yes, instead of a measured response, Israel has carried out a years-long genocide in Gaza.
Unless the former secretary of state believes the United Nations is just making stuff up too.
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