Our Israel explainer series coming to socials

And a note on editorial choices

In the coming days, we’ll publish a series of 60-second explainer videos on the history of Israel and the conflicts in the Middle East. Because these were designed specifically for social media, we wanted to take a moment to introduce them to you as a piece of our larger strategy.

To follow us on socials: Instagram, X/Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook

More than 60 million Americans get their news primarily or exclusively on social media. For those under 25, the number who get their news from Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is many times greater than those who get news from Fox, CNN, or MSNBC. We want to meet these viewers where they are.

Further, the engine of social media is engagement, and engagement on news stories too often comes from arousing a viewer’s anger or fear. This is a recipe (as we’ve all seen again and again) for further dividing us and driving hate. But there is another way to drive engagement: curiosity.

We think of our content library like a ladder, with short social media videos being the first rung. The goal is to meet new consumers where they are, drive curiosity, and encourage them to explore our content library. Three Whys Deep will be the next step after our social posts, followed by In Your Words, and on to Civil Conversations, Civil Stories, and our podcast. Once we have further developed our library by early next year, there will be several subjects to explore with each show.

With the extraordinarily complex history behind the Israel-Gaza war, and the tremendous amount of misinformation on social media, we decided to begin our social media strategy sooner than planned. Our audience for these posts is the millions of Americans who may be generally aware of the dynamics in the region, but have not followed the topic closely - until now. Through a series of dispassionate, short-form videos, we hope to situate this moment in history, encourage viewers to think more broadly about the subject, and explore further the ideas raised in the series on their own (as we do not yet have the content library or capacity to quickly produce longer form explainers on these subjects).

We should also make a note about editorial decisions. As I wrote in our essay on Israel, having a point of view is inevitable. Our point of view is that liberal democracy (as political scientists use the term: democratic government constrained by a Constitution providing individual rights) inside a liberal world order provides the best chance for human flourishing. We also believe that the pursuit of objectivity - rather than the bias of ideology - best empowers people to think critically for themselves.