'Missiles from Iran': Facebook, TikTok and Instagram feed us <b>scary news from the past</b>
On Sunday, June 7, late in the evening, Iran attacked Israel. The Israel Defense Forces spokesman quickly released a video: "A short while ago, the Iranian terror regime launched missiles toward the territory of the State of Israel." Across the country, Israelis rushed to tidy up their bomb shelters and braced for another sleepless night. Two weeks later, Erez was checking his Instagram feed one morning when he came across a video. On screen: the same IDF spokesman, the same posture, the same alarming tone — and the same announcement, word for word. No date appeared on screen; without checking, there was no telling it was the same old video. It looked entirely current. Another three weeks went by. Avi was scrolling through TikTok and saw it too: the same spokesman, the same message. On September 5, Ayelet saw it as well — 90 days after it was first posted. Close In reality, the event happened once. But on social media, the algorithm kept showing users reruns of the emergency announcement, which kept racking up views. As far as the recommendation system was concerned, that's what users wanted. Recycled war declarations, weeks-old terror attacks raised from the dead, old updates about looming attacks from Home Front Command and other anxiety-inducing posts pulled up from the digital archive are part of a worsening phenomenon on social media, now the main way for people to communicate. One way to put it: Tech companies have erased time, or at least obscured it, pushing old content in the so-called news feed while also hiding the date and hindering the ability to actually check when a post was first posted. And when we lose our grasp of time, a frightening past can come back to haunt us. A Haaretz digital investigation, based on an analysis of tens of thousands of posts and videos from the Facebook, Instagram and TikTok accounts of six digital personas created for this purpose, points to hundreds of cases in which the algorithm re-served old, anxiety-inducing news, the vast majority on Facebook and TikTok . Many videos carry no visible date, and real users struggled to tell when they were posted. Their comments say as much: "Is this from today???"; "Not again 💔"; "Why cause unnecessary panic"; "Panicked, I thought it was now"; "It would be nice if you put a date on these videos"; "Why. Is. There. No. Date. On. The. Video." Rahm Emanuel on Haaretz Podcast: 'We're at a tipping point, there is no reset button' for Israel-U.S. relations A sample of headlines from the personas' feeds: "Incident has not ended: Shooting attack in Sharon region — cruel murder spree in several locations" (a news site's video, shown 73 days after the attack); "Cleared for publication: Four soldiers killed in Lebanon" (appeared 87 days after the soldiers were killed); "Hezbollah launched rockets toward Nahariya for the first time in weeks" (47 days later); "Initial report: Our forces have begun a wave of strikes in Iran" (64 days later); "Cleared by the censor: Impacts in Karmiel area" (71 days later); " Iranian threat against Israel : 'We will respond decisively and painfully — tonight, look to the skies'" (39 days after the threat). The investigation pins down a phenomenon users noticed but struggled to put their finger on. The process that led to this point did not happen overnight. Mundane technical changes — part of an economic battle between tech giants worth hundreds of billions of dollars — gradually added up to a phenomenon that is undermining how we perceive reality. Close First, the platforms invested heavily in getting people to make and watch videos, and it paid off: Short videos became a cultural phenomenon. Brands and marketers use them to sell products; political campaigners, including in the current election, make content tailored to the format (the prime minister stands out in particular); news outlets worldwide realized that to survive, they had to join the game. Viewing data show a rapid, broad rise in video consumption. No wonder the "clip economy" has become a hallmark of the era. Second, the same platforms — chiefly Facebook, Instagram , TikTok and YouTube — hid or removed timestamps from their videos, branded Reels, Shorts or, in TikTok's case, simply Videos. That lets them serve content untethered from chronology and tailored mainly to users' preferences, raising both the potential for addiction and time spent on the platform. Want to know when the clip you're watching was posted? Often, the date is hidden. On TikTok, researchers have had to build special tools to find it. It's not just the videos. The platforms have undermined our sense of time in many ways. The feed went from chronological to algorithmic. This is also true for comments which are now by default, sorted by relevance, not date. On Instagram and Facebook, timestamps provide a retrospective perspective that becomes more complex as you scroll back: "13 weeks ago," "a year ago." When exactly was something posted? It's hard to say. But the biggest shift came with short video, which the apps push aggressively. Those are techniques TikTok perfected to deepen users' addiction. Their spread to other platforms is the TikTokification of the information we consume. This has consequences. This year, for the first time, social media narrowly overtook TV and news websites as a news source globally, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. Studies also link greater exposure to security content on social media to higher anxiety. Haaretz's findings add to a growing body of evidence that the way tech giants choose to build social media platforms may harm users' mental health. Here is another way to think about it. Imagine opening a newspaper with no date anywhere. The stories, it turns out, come from different times — some from today, some from last week, some six months old. And the headline about the war resuming? We won't tell you when it's from. Feel free to guess. The TikTokification of platforms Social media has metamorphosed over the years. Facebook arrived early in the millennium as a place to connect with friends and share photos and updates. Twitter, now X, followed as a text-based network; Instagram laid claim to the photo-sharing crown. Then, in 2017, TikTok was born, betting it all on video. TikTok, owned by China's ByteDance, has gone furthest in erasing time. Its model rests on short videos, many without a visible date: fast, frenetic, filling the screen, each swipe rewarding the user with another. On the surface, it's entertainment. But studies describe a process that erodes the human capacity to make sound decisions and resist harmful impulses. Some parts of the app show a timestamp, but the default For You feed lets users scroll for hours with no sign that they have sunk into the past. Indeed, a European Commission investigation has preliminarily found that TikTok's design encourages addiction in breach of EU law. Close "The rise of TikTok since 2017 is perhaps the main social media story of the last decade," the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report says. "It is also the story of a video format that has shaped how people think of online content." Industry leaders have said as much. "People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors in 2022, adding: "This is why our focus on Reels is so important over the long term." Meta owns Facebook and Instagram, used daily by 64 and 58 percent of Israelis, respectively, according to the Israel Internet Association; TikTok, by 34 percent. This is how everything unfolded: Instagram introduced Reels, its version of TikTok's hit short-video format, as early as 2019; YouTube launched Shorts a year later. In mid-2025, Facebook announced it was moving all its video to Reels, a process it said took a few months. And like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube all hid their videos' timestamps — just as more and more users were turning to video for information. Meanwhile, more people are getting their news from social media: almost 60 percent of Israelis frequently do, according to an Israel Internet Association survey. Yet though the platforms are a central venue for news - which they don't produce, relying on other sources - they don't follow the rules news organizations do. The news stories that the algorithm serves up from the archive into your feed is a striking example of this. In search of lost time For the investigation, Haaretz created six fictitious personas modeled on Israeli archetypes; Avi, Erez and Ayelet are three of them. All six got Facebook and TikTok accounts, and four also got Instagram. They scrolled for nearly four months. Haaretz archived every post they were shown and compared each item's original publication date with the date it appeared. The findings show that resurfacing old content is ongoing and that the platforms recycle it on a large scale, because their algorithmic feeds let them resurface popular posts. The vast majority is innocuous, from stand-up clips to cat videos. But in Israel, where many users click on the security content that regularly fills their feeds, the algorithm also resurfaced alerts about terror attacks, missile fire, assassinations, political announcements and crime — and a report about a person who committed sexual harassment. The alarming news the algorithm resurfaced came mainly from news outlets, including Kan News, Channel 14, N12, Israel Hayom and Ynet. Recycled posts also came from bodies such as the Israel Police, the IDF and the Home Front Command, and from high-profile figures such as Yoseph Haddad. Close 'We have to remember that ultimately, these are businesses that want to make money. They care about what keeps us on their app the longest. And one of those things is anxiety.' Maya Ilany, CEO of the Brandeis Institute, which deals with technology, democracy and policy By Haaretz's calculation, each digital persona that was created for this investigation was shown an average of two alarming videos a week. Even if this appears to be a low number of recycled scary posts, they have an effect. "It naturally puts us on high alert," says Dr. Almog Simchon, head of the Computational Social Psychology Lab at Ben-Gurion University. "When you get security news, you need to act on it in real time — go to the safe room, check on family. We want an indication, here and now, that if something happened, our loved ones are OK. You need to process the information and figure out whether it's really happening now. If not, you need to cognitively bring down the adrenaline and stress, and you can't switch the system on in an instant and then off as if everything's fine. Recovery takes longer than activation." Even in doubt, Simchon says, the body needs to treat the signal as something that may have happened. "We don't want to see breaking news about a terrible event and instinctively think, 'This must be old, it probably has nothing to do with me.' If it does concern me, the implications are enormous. So we want to take it into account and pay attention." Resurfacing alarming information, he adds, keeps us close to events and denies us the processing that distance brings. Users can check when a video was published by stopping on it and clicking. On Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, that reveals the date. On TikTok, it can't be done from the For You feed at the heart of the app; the determined must open the comments and find when the first one was posted. Haaretz national security How Israel cultivated Gaza militias Israeli firm helping autocrats hunt gay men, activists Israeli Anti-Qatar op abruptly halted Secret Bibi campaign exposed Israelis hire lobbyists to push U.S. withdrawal from UN Test exposes secret Israeli missile Dark tech in Israeli campaigns How Israel armed Iran's neighbor We found Israel's U.S. influence-op But this has a side effect. Clicking signals to