2 Dhul Hijjah, 1445

“Israel Secretly Targeted American Lawmakers With Gaza War Influence Campaign”

For the time being I’m okay with this blog consisting of running coverage of the Iraelī government’s propaganda campaign.

The Israeli government is behind a large-scale influence campaign primarily aimed at Black lawmakers and young progressives in the United States and Canada. The operation, whose existence was first reported by Haaretz in March, was launched after the start of the war in Gaza and was intended to sway certain segments of public opinion on Israel’s conduct.

The influence campaign made extensive use of fake websites and social media to promote content that is pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim content, as well as disinformation about antisemitism on American campuses, according to an investigation by the Fake Reporter organization, published today.

The operation was run by an Israeli company that specializes in political campaigns. According to sources and information obtained by Haaretz, the operation was commissioned by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry but carried out by a different party, for fear that its exposure could entangle Israel in a crisis. Among the candidates for the job was the organization Voices of Israel, which received half of its original funding from the Israeli government. Asked for a response to this article, Voices of Israel denied that it was related to the influence campaign exposed.

— Haaretz, Israel Secretly Targeted American Lawmakers With Gaza War Influence Campaign. June 5, 2024.

More from Haaretz:

Voices of Israel is a public benefit company that was founded as an initiative by the Strategic Affairs Ministry and Public Diplomacy Ministry and is better known by its original name, Solomon’s Sling. The company, which is not subject to Israel’s freedom of information law, was established to shape awareness in the digital and media arenas, and fight the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and antisemitic discourse by enlisting pro-Israel activists and organizations in Israel’s public diplomacy efforts [1].

I previously shared a story about how Meta caught wind that their platforms were being used to distribute fake content related to Israel’s propaganda campaign. Haaretz reports that OpenAI (the AI company behind ChatGTP) was also alerted to nefarious activity associated with the generation of fake content.

Activity by a commercial company in Israel called STOIC, because technically we disrupted the activity, not the company. We nicknamed this operation Zero Zeno, for the founder of the stoic school of philosophy. The people behind Zero Zeno used our models to generate articles and comments that were then posted across multiple platforms, notably Instagram, Facebook, X, and websites associated with this operation.

— OpenAI, Disrupting deceptive uses of AI by covert influence operations. May 30, 2024.

Haaretz again:

Fake Reporter also found a direct link between the influence operation and the Israeli company. Evidently, the creators of the fakes sites accidentally included in the original code mentions of a GitHub account connected to an executive with Stoic and a Stoic code for the mass creation of fake accounts. Stoic is known as a company that specializes in political technologies, audience mapping, information analysis and management of volunteers and digital campaigns. Most of its activity is abroad.

This poorly coordinated plot was orchestrated in the name of what the Israelī government refers to as “hasbara” or “public diplomacy” (i.e., “propaganda”). It may have cost as much as “hundreds of millions of shekels,” according to one Israelī source quoted in Haaretz. Relative to what generative AI is capable of today, this was absolute amateur work and an abject failure by the Zionist state. In the future however, we may not be able to say the same.

Also related

1. U.S. Department of State: Increasing diplomacy through generative AI
   • Where the word “diplomacy” came up previously, this time from the Americans. Note taken…