The Israeli government isn’t doing it justice: The alleged influence campaign on the Gaza crisis is not an attack on Israel, according to Shatz

According to Shatz of Israelis, they feel that they’re being attacked around the clock on social media, which seems to be a reasonable thing to do. He said that there was little impact on his organization’s reports about influence campaigns.

According to Israeli researchers, websites that seem to target mostly younger, progressive Americans with a pro-Israeli spin on the war in Gaza are linked to a company that is being paid by the Israeli government to sway lawmakers and public opinion in the U.S.

The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs didn’t reply right away. The office denied they were involved in the campaign. The Times says details of the network of accounts came from internal documents and individuals involved in the campaign.

According to the Times, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs earmarked around $2 million for the campaign, which used hundreds of fake accounts impersonating made up people to target US lawmakers. The accounts posed as Americans and posted pro-Israel messages, calling on members of congress to fund Israeli military operations. Several Black Democrats, like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, were targeted by the campaigns using OpenAI’s CHATGPT.

Amichai Chickli, the Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs, tweeted a denial Wednesday about the alleged influence campaign. He accused Fake Reporter of being a troll against the soldiers of Israel. STOIC did not respond to interview requests from NPR.

One site labels American universities as “safe” or “unsafe” for Jewish students; another one argues against the idea of a Palestinian state, arguing: “Being a part of a mass movement that is advocating for some of the worst men-made [sic] social structures is even worse than standing with the oppressors”; a third focused on the historic slave trade in East Africa, where slavers included Muslims. The websites share the same IP address, suggesting common ownership.

The CEO of Fakereporter says doing it against the U.S. is stupid. There are tools that can be used to target Israelis, so we should be worried. I don’t trust anyone with these kinds of tools.

Is There an Israeli Online Influence Campaign to Drive a Wedge Between Palestinians and Black Americans, and How It Is Trying to Sway American lawmakers?

The publicly available source code of the websites also makes explicit reference to “stoico,” which is the internet domain name of the company, the researchers wrote. The GitHub user’s profile is no longer accessible, but as of Wednesday, online search results remain.

DFRLab said the fake accounts mostly interacted with other fake accounts. Meta said that it deleted accounts before they became popular with real people.

There were campaigns to drive a wedge between the Palestinians and the Black Americans, according to an anthropologist in the United Kingdom.

“Different oppressed groups are reciprocating the solidarity and the affinity that they have felt in the shared sense of oppression,” said Aouragh. She says the influence campaigns are an attempt to break that unity.

“Framing Islam around the world as the problem is not something that our state’s supposed to be involved with,” said Schatz. I’m embarrassed by the messages it is promoting, because it is promoting hate and fear.

Source: A covert Israeli online influence campaign tried to sway American lawmakers

Identifying the perpetrators of hate crimes on social media during the 2009 Gaza war: An Israeli official’s comment on “Operation Cast Lead”

The social media company Meta, and artificial intelligence company OpenAI have released reports in the last week. Both companies said they had taken down fake accounts tied to STOIC. OpenAI said STOIC used their tools to generate articles and comments that the fake accounts then used to distribute.

Back in 2009, an official from Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told an Israeli newspaperthat the department was establishing a team to promote Israel and specifically to rally international support in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza that year, known as Operation Cast Lead. The people who were hired to write messages on social media were foreign-language speakers. The official said that workers who were working on behalf of the Israeli government didn’t have to say they were doing something for the Israelis.

“The main countries that hasbara has traditionally been targeting are the main funders of Israel, the main supporter. So Europe and North America, according to Aouragh. She said the common narratives in Europe were anti-semitism or the idea of Arab terrorists.

In the Gulf countries, Aouragh says, hasbara calls for people to focus on their own affairs instead of Palestine. Shouldn’t you worry about your own financial problems, your own conflicts, and your own wars?

Social media influence campaigns are one of many ways that hasbara operates, but it’s important not to spread misinformation during war.

It is possible to give legitimacy to an act that is at its core, which is anti-democratic in many ways. “And they’re being done by anti-democratic countries or non-democratic countries [such] as Russia or Iran. I’m not sure why we should participate in it.