Israeli PR fails to impress social media users

Arash Dabestani of BBC Monitoring reports on a battle for online opinion:

Israel's account of its 31 May raid on the Gaza aid flotilla has met with a generally negative social media response, according to an analysis of Tweets by the online sentiment-measuring tool Tweetfeel.com.

Tweetfeel said 60% of Tweets on 2 June had a "negative" sentiment score regarding the search word 'Israel'. 

"Israel attacked in international waters ... This time THEY [Israelis] are the terrorists," said one of the more-publishable Tweets. A general search on Twitter.com (with the search word 'flotilla') revealed similar results, with the vast majority of Tweets condemning or questioning Israel's actions.

In other observations, 65% (as of 4 June) of voters at VoteGlobal.com said that Israel had been wrong to attack the flotilla. Voters were asked the question: "Israel navy raid on aid flotilla. Right or wrong?"

The Israeli foreign ministry's attempt to engage English-language social network users appears to have backfired. Officials answered individual negative Tweets on the ministry's Twitter page with explanations or links to official statements or pro-Israel entries. 

For example, in response to one comment, the ministry's Twitter feed posted: "If this was really about helping Gaza, the flotilla would have docked in [the Israeli port of] Ashdod & allowed the UN 2transfer cargo 2Gaza." 

But negative Tweets aimed at the ministry continued. "Israel media machine keeps tweeting me with crap," according to "Ayarocks". Other responses rejected or satirised the Israeli account of the incident.

Meanwhile, more evidence of Israel's online problems emerged at one of the fake Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs Twitter accounts, Israel Global PR. The site has more followers (4,225) than the official Twitter page of the Israeli Foreign Ministry (3,673), and posts comments such as "AID is a seaborne virus emanating from Turkey, but with your support Israel can stop AID dead in its tracks."