Who has already done this

Shabbos Kestenbaum sued Harvard, testified to Congress twice, and spoke at a national party convention to a standing ovation. Six weeks later a newspaper counted his followers on X. Seventeen thousand nine hundred.

You need no one’s approval to start an account like the ones below, and not one of these people had any. What they had was a mechanism, and there are only four. Start a format nobody else is running. Build an audience on another subject and spend it here. Be somewhere nobody else can be. Or buy it.

The first two you can begin tonight. The last two you cannot copy, and every resource in this field blurs the difference.

Being covered is not the same as having somewhere to send people.

Mechanism one, a format nobody else is running

Rawan Osman grew up in a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley and was a student in Germany when the war began. Within days of 7 October she set up Arabs Ask, an Instagram forum where Arabs put questions about Judaism and Israel and get answered in Arabic. About 200,000 followers by November 2025, from nothing at all.

That is a question box in the other side’s language, which is this site’s whole strategy expressed as a format rather than as a message.

Her family have cut off all contact with her.

Jewish Jess ran the marketing department of a London fashion brand. She read into the subject, then followed pro-Palestinian accounts and argued in their replies for a while, and only after that set up anything of her own. Bedroom, phone, straight to camera, one news subject a day, London accent, swearing bleeped. By November 2025: more than 75,000 on Instagram and 80,000 on TikTok.

Notice the order. The replies came first, which is the mechanic in how a small account gets seen.

Max Cohen was a paralegal studying for the law admissions test. He posted his first TikTok in January 2024. His seventh video got 1.3 million views. In April he made a sketch about a Jewish mother, it did around three million across two platforms, and he left the law firm at the end of June. He now has 155,000 on TikTok and 166,000 on Instagram.

His own explanation of why the mother sketches travelled is the most useful sentence anybody in this field has said out loud: “People saw their own moms in it, Christian moms, Jamaican moms, Indian moms. It humanized Jewish families.”

Be honest about that seventh video. Six of his posts did nothing, and nothing in them predicted the one that worked.

He did not earn 1.3 million views by trying harder than the people still on forty followers.

What he did earn was noticing which one had landed, and then making the same thing again until it stopped working.

Mechanism two, an audience built somewhere else and spent here

Melinda Strauss posts kosher recipes and has since 2011. Her most watched video is called “What are the Kosher Laws?” and the people asking were not Jewish. She was at nearly 800,000 TikTok followers in April 2023, before any of this started, and more than 1.3 million by October 2024.

Loay Alshareef posted about etymology, languages and biblical history from Abu Dhabi, then carried that audience into this argument. 38,000 Instagram followers in January 2022. 656,000 in August 2026.

Recipes in New York, etymology in Abu Dhabi. The subject that gets you an audience does not have to be the subject you care about.

Montana Tucker had been a professional performer since she was eight. In June 2023, before the war, she had over 9 million followers on TikTok and close to 3 million on Instagram. In February 2024, after four months of constant posting about October 7, she had 9 million and 3.1 million.

Read those two pairs again. The advocacy spent that account. It did not build it. She lost hundreds of thousands of followers, lost brand deals, and long-standing collaborators refused to work with her again.

She knew exactly what she was spending. That is the useful part.

Mechanism one again, in arguments that are not ours

Heather Cox Richardson wrote a post on a neglected Facebook page in September 2019. Readers asked questions, so she answered them two days later, and she has written every night since, usually filing between eleven at night and quarter to four in the morning. Her newsletter now carries over 2.9 million subscribers and outsells every American newspaper but two.

The part that gets left out of that story: she had been on Facebook since 2016, when one post of hers was shared by more than 21,000 accounts, and she was already a tenured historian. Credentials are not an audience. She had one without the other for three years.

The Secret Barrister started a blog and an anonymous account in 2015, while practising criminal law full time. The method was correcting press coverage of the courts, in real time, with the actual law. 31,000 followers by March 2017, and a number one bestseller the year after, still under a pseudonym.

If you cannot be public, that is a route rather than a consolation prize.

Mechanisms three and four, which belong to the other side

Motaz Azaiza had about 27,500 Instagram followers before October 2023 and 18.25 million a hundred days later. No technique produced that, and Time’s own citation says why: for 108 days he was “the world’s eyes and ears” in a place international reporters could not enter.

Access cannot be copied. The thing underneath it can. First-hand material from a room you are actually in beats commentary on a story everybody already has. That works at a council meeting on a Tuesday.

Jackson Hinkle is the other engine, and you should be able to describe it out loud when somebody tells you the other side is winning online. He gained 244,571 followers in the four months before 7 October and 2,036,957 in the four months after, on a platform paying him up to 97 per cent of his subscription revenue. One analysis firm found around 40 per cent of the 1.2 million followers he picked up in the first nineteen days were inauthentic.

Bought reach and borrowed rage. Say so, with the numbers, and the argument moves.

What this costs, before you decide

Jewish Jess puts her ratio at 95 per cent hate to 5 per cent support. Her videos were mass reported and removed. She asked the police to help secure her home. She is leaving Britain.

Melinda Strauss now gets antisemitic comments under recipe videos. Staying non-political is not an exit.

The threats do not wait for you to get big. Fatema Al-Harbi had 9,000 followers when hers started.

Aviva Klompas, who posts as often as once an hour, says of the first three months: “There’s so much about the timeframe in October, November and December that I actually don’t remember.”

And in February 2024 the contents of a private Australian group chat were published: around 600 Jewish creatives and academics, about 100 of them with names, jobs and photographs attached, threats made against a five year old, one family into hiding.

Do what is findable about you first. It takes about forty-five minutes, once.

Four things to say when somebody asks why you bother

“The account with 80,000 followers on this belongs to somebody who was doing fashion marketing before the war.”

“I’m not trying to go viral. I’m trying to be the person people check.”

“Six of his videos did nothing and the seventh did 1.3 million. You have to still be posting on the seventh.”

“I know what it costs. I have read what happened to the people who went first.”

Tonight, and the twelve weeks after

Fill in the blanks195 words

Two questions, without scrolling back up. Which two of the four are actually available to you? And what does your day already make you the only person in this argument who knows?

Set up tonight. Write one sentence naming the thing you know properly, whether that is a trade, a language, a kitchen, a courtroom or a set of accounts.

If that sentence names something real, then I will post it this week as one thing, made and finished, rather than as an announcement that I intend to.

If I get six posts in with nothing moving, then I will keep posting rather than change subject, because six posts is exactly where Max Cohen still was.

If twelve weeks pass with nothing moving, then I will change the format and hold the subject, which is the change that worked for him in April.

And the obstacle to expect is the flat stretch after the first fortnight, when the only people reading are the eleven who already know you. Abuse is not what ends most accounts. What ends them is quietly deciding, somewhere around week five, that this was always going to be somebody else’s job.