Last October, Ella Kenan, a content creator and founder of the BrightMind organization, which fights fake news about Israel, decided to take a break and fly to the South Pacific. "I traveled to the island nation of Tuvalu, which has less than 10,000 residents. It's a flight from Fiji on a small 20-person plane, and you land at an airport the size of a small apartment. I was the only tourist there for ten days.
"I feel very alive in places like that, even if I eat food that isn’t tasty or meet people who don't understand me and have never seen anyone like me. There was almost no internet there, except for a few points connected to Starlink. I went online once a day for 40 minutes, and that was it."
From Tuvalu, she flew to another island nation, Samoa. An encounter with a taxi driver there jolted her back to reality. "I got into the car, and he asked me where I was from. I said, 'I'm from Israel,' and he replied: 'Did you hear that they killed Sinwar?' We’re almost 17,000 kilometers from Israel, and still the driver knew about it. That made me realize how preoccupied people are with us."
Wind back a year, to October 2023, and the thought of what the world knows or thinks about us is what galvanized Kenan into action. When she realized that, in addition to the physical front, there was a digital front, with a huge number of pro-Palestinian accounts on social networks, she took on a mission: "I saw that they had an organized message page with a complete denial of the massacre, and it was starting to go viral. I was in shock that this was happening while we were still fighting for our lives. I said to myself: We have maybe 24 hours to create a narrative, and if not, we're doomed. From now on, I'm working on this."
Thus, in the very first days of the war, she created the hashtag #HamasIsISIS, which was later mentioned in a speech by then-US President Joe Biden. "This hashtag was born because I saw that a Hamas spokesman issued a statement that if Israel bombed Gaza, they would execute a hostage every hour, and stream it on social media," she says. "And then, they started quickly deleting everything from the networks, so as not to look like ISIS and ruin their freedom fighter image. The move we made dominated the networks for three months and reached billions of views."
Subsequently, she also founded BrightMind, to strengthen the Israeli narrative on social networks and fight fake news. Her organization has removed inciting and false content about Israel, and led to the suspension of students and the cancellation of antisemitic events across US campuses. It now has over 100,000 community members who carry out tasks and try to engender a change of outlook.
"They erased history"
Kenan (37) grew up in Herzliya, but divided her time between Israel and Europe, where her father lived. After seven years of service in the Israeli Intelligence Corps, she went on a year-long trip, during which she decided to start a travel blog, Ella Travels World, which gained momentum online. Since 2015, she has visited dozens of countries, some of them very remote and very different from Western culture.
"It's getting away from the familiarity of Europe or Israel, opening your mind, being a stranger and understanding cultural nuances and complexities I hadn't been exposed to before. Spending time on a small island in the Caribbean creates a different life experience for a person. I didn't do it as a vacation. I was there for months, and my worldview changed."
Kenan completed her bachelor's degree in law and political science at Reichman University, then founded a digital marketing services company. "I worked with about 30 tourism offices around the world on branding destinations to young audiences on social networks. Until the war, I only dealt with that. The company still exists, I'm just not there."
Despite outward appearances, Kenan emphasizes that BrightMind does not engage in public relations. "That's not my world. I deal with influencing the places where narratives are formed. Our content is on social networks. At the beginning of the war, it reached 400 million views per month around the world, and today it's about 150 million views.
"Our content is based on a focus group located outside Israel. We understood what could move the needle among young people, because that's the age when identity is formed. We make content go viral by way of huge communities. That way, we get out of the echo chamber, and reach audiences the Israelis don't."
For example, Kenan talks about mapping more than 1,000 entries on Wikipedia, which were distorted, deleted, or changed in a way that severs the connection between Jews and Israel. "They put false links in there, and erased history," she says passionately. "We investigated biases in Wikipedia in general, and Elon Musk shared it, which increased views a lot.
"Over the past few months, Wikipedia has been holding hearings for organized pro-Palestinian groups that tried to influence narratives. All their activity has been suspended permanently -- it's not like a Facebook account, you can't reopen it. Six or seven years will go by before they can have their editing privileges reinstated. Wikipedia has five billion views per month, and remember that AI tools also use the information there, which is why it’s very significant."
Can you give an example of these distortions?
"Some of them changed Jerusalem to a city in the southern Levant, not the capital of Israel. The founder of Wikipedia went in and corrected it himself. The next day, a pro-Palestinian organization deleted it, so he took on the matter and fixed it from within the system. This means that our influence is measurable. The size of our communities and our critical mass has enabled us to delete thousands of fake content items. Organizations issued apologies and changed narratives online because of the pressure we exerted.
"Recently, we managed to get an event in Canada cancelled, where they were going to talk about how there would be a Muslim caliphate, and Jews should be killed as a first step. I don't silence criticism of Israel, but this event was justifying violence against Israelis and erasing documented history. Entire generations could be raised on lies."
"We deserve to walk with dignity"
Today, having raised donor funding, Kenan’s organization employs 12 full-time staffers. "The idea is to create an effective influence system," she explains. "For example, someone who served in the IDF Spokesperson's Office until two years ago was falsely accused on social networks of murdering an elderly Palestinian man. Through our community and reports, we managed to get it removed."
Despite all this, Kenan notes a certain decline in activity as time has passed. "After half a year, people in the communities suffered information burnout, and I understand that. I'd love to get more people and more influence to break the size barrier. People don't understand how important this is: brands are built during routine times, but tested in emergencies.
"Many people tend to say: Okay, worst case scenario, they won't like us, who cares? But it affects academic relations, commerce and the economy, security, and more. The Biden administration stopped arming Israel because of public opinion. That's why I'm on the social networks. I'm not on CNN and I don't go to campuses, although I appreciate those who do, like Yoseph Haddad and Noa Tishby."
Thanks to her work, Kenan was chosen to light a torch last year on the State of Israel’s 76th Independence Day. "Believe in your power. We can influence and create change," she said at the ceremony.
Have there also been failures?
"Many things don't succeed. That happens every week. There's a great deal of content that I couldn't get removed, or events that I couldn't get cancelled, or campaigns that didn't catch on. A campaign we did about Qatar in December went viral in the US, and on the other hand, a campaign about Iran was less successful. I won't stop trying because of that."
To conclude, where will you be in five years?
"In an ideal world, I will do anything that can advance Israeli society to a better place, and it won't be in a political framework. Up until October 7, I didn't really deal with the day-to-day, and then I realized how important it is that I play an active part. Israelis need to know that they can live their lives here.
"I believe in the power of the collective, and I want there to be a million gladiators here. It's important for me to build people as influencers, and give them the tools to do it. Some say, 'provide facts and speak truth,' but people tend more towards emotion, which is why the way things are conveyed is very important. My contribution is more significant in that sense. We deserve to walk through the world with dignity."
This article is part of the annual "Globes" "40 Under 40" young leadership in Israel project.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on April 1, 2025.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2025.