As Israelis were waking up to the unfolding horrors of Oct. 7, and the security establishment was mustering its response to the largest targeted attack on Jews since the Holocaust, social media users across the globe were being subjected to graphic and scaring content that flooded the digital space as the attack was brutally livestreamed on our favorite apps. On Oct. 7, not only were the Israeli Defense Forces caught by surprise, but mainstream social media platforms were hijacked by Hamas as weapons of mass psychological terror. That’s because these corporations have thus far not been incentivized enough to systematically remove posts and block content that violate their own digital policies.

That fateful day I received an urgent call, “We need your help.” It was a senior representative of a major social media company. I knew at that moment that the world was about to witness nightmarish social media content, but nothing could have prepared me, or social media users around the world, for the extremely graphic posts, the hate and vitriol being spread like wildfire that was already happening, and what was to come.

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, showcased Israeli women paraded through the streets in Gaza after being raped. TikTok videos celebrated live lynchings of IDF soldiers, and a southern Israeli family was executed via a livestream to their personal accounts on Facebook.

In the weeks that followed, social media platforms scrambled to set up emergency response teams and increase content moderation capacity. But their reaction could not hide the glaring reality — the failure of these........

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