SKeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom  ·  InflueAnswers

Targeting Hicham Haddad: Online Incitement Amid Lebanon's War Narratives

On November 5, 2024, Lebanese media personality Hicham Haddad released a viral video questioning whether Lebanon was winning — or had won — the war, generating over 500,000 Instagram views during Israel's invasion of Lebanon. The video sparked immediate and intense polarization: pro-Hezbollah groups launched coordinated incitement campaigns against Haddad, while critics of Hezbollah welcomed his remarks.

This report, produced in collaboration with the SKeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom at the Samir Kassir Foundation, analyzes the online campaign that followed — mapping its scale, its actors, its narrative architecture, and its place within a broader pattern of targeted digital harassment against public figures in Lebanon.

Methodology

Researchers analyzed 865 tweets containing "هشام حداد" (Hicham Haddad) published between November 5–15, 2024. Each tweet was categorized by sentiment and account characteristics. Of the 81 most inciting accounts identified, detailed profiling was conducted to assess the nature of participation — whether organic, coordinated, or algorithmically amplified.

Key Findings

Scale of the Online Response

Of the 865 tweets analyzed in the ten-day window following Haddad's video:

• 687 tweets (79%) were negative — hostile, inciting, or threatening
• 122 tweets (14%) were positive — expressing support or solidarity
• 56 tweets (6%) were neutral — informational or contextual

A pro-Hezbollah account initially amplified the original video to 668,000 views, effectively seeding the controversy. Within three to four days of its spread, 18 original media pieces — including response videos, animations, and songs — were produced specifically to attack Haddad. One criticism video alone garnered 600,000 views, indicating significant amplification through messaging platforms beyond X.

Account Characteristics

Of the 81 most inciting accounts analyzed, only 14 displayed real profile pictures and names. The overwhelming majority operated through anonymous avatars, enabling aggressive and unfiltered hate speech without accountability. Accounts showed varying creation dates — some established as far back as 2011–2012, others created in 2023–2024 — suggesting a possible mix of long-standing ideological actors and accounts mobilized specifically for this campaign.

Geographic distribution of the accounts extended well beyond Lebanon, with claimed connections to Syria (6 accounts), Yemen (6), Iraq (6), Palestine (4), and various European locations — demonstrating the cross-border virality of the campaign and the transnational nature of the pro-Hezbollah digital ecosystem.

Narrative Patterns

The incitement centered on two interlocking rhetorical strategies:

• Framing Haddad as a traitor and Zionist collaborator — with explicit threats of future punishment, positioning the campaign as a form of wartime accountability rather than harassment.
• Redefining victory — countering Haddad's implied critique by reframing success in ideological rather than material terms, emphasizing sacrifice, resistance persistence, and spiritual resilience over battlefield outcomes.

This dual strategy served both to delegitimize the messenger and to insulate the resistance narrative from empirical challenge.

Conclusions

The campaign against Hicham Haddad reflects a broader, recurring trend in Lebanon, where public figures critical of Hezbollah — journalists, comedians, commentators, activists — become subjects of systematic online incitement. The pattern is consistent across cases: rapid mobilization, anonymous account clusters, cross-platform amplification, and rhetorical framing that transforms criticism into treachery.

While the accounts involved appeared primarily human-operated rather than automated, their coordinated behavior suggests ideological alignment through shared forums and channels — creating decentralized yet unified responses that blur the distinction between organized orchestration and organic backlash. X's limited 9% penetration in Lebanon means the campaign's real reach extends far beyond what platform data captures, primarily through WhatsApp and Telegram forwarding chains.