Israeli influence marketing campaign secretly targets US lawmakers: NPR

Web pages that appear to secretly target young, determined American citizens with more pro-Israel ideologies in the conflict in Gaza are linked to an organization designed to influence lawmakers and public opinion within the US. The payment is being made through Israeli authorities. with Israeli researchers and untapped york opportunity,

A brand new report published Wednesday by FakeReporters, an Israeli monitoring team that tracks misinformation, has identified five specific web pages linked to an Israeli political consulting company called STOIC. The Times reported on Wednesday that STOIC is being paid $2 million through Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs to persuade Democratic members of the US Congress to continue aid to Israel, at a time when Many Democrats are weighing U.S. military aid to Israel amid rising civilian deaths and the conflict in Gaza.

A website rates American universities as “safe” or “unsafe” for Jewish scholars; Another argues in opposition to the principle of Palestinian environment: “Being part of a mass movement that is advocating some of the worst man-made social structures is worse than standing with the oppressors”; A third focused on the historical slave trade in East Africa, where slaveholders included Muslims. Internet sites share the same IP address, suggesting common ownership.

Even though the campaign did not gain momentum online, according to tech companies that still investigated it, Israel’s former ambassador to the US Michael Oren called for an Israeli investigation. opportunity’ Reporting. Oren wrote in a post on Twitter that the campaign is “undue interference in the internal politics of our most important ally,” declaring that it “causes strategic damage to the State of Israel in a time of war.”

“It is absolutely stupid to do this against the United States,” says Achia Schatz, CEO of FakeReporter. “The Israelis should be concerned because we can find ourselves easily targeted by these types of tools. I don’t trust these kinds of devices in anyone’s hands.”

Researchers discovered internet sites supplied code on Git, a platform coders deserve to control their work. The supplied code refers to a GitHub person with the same title as the co-founder of STOIC.

Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli tweeted a denial regarding the alleged influence campaign on Wednesday. He accused the fakereporter of “slander against IDF soldiers and the State of Israel”. STOIC did not respond to NPR’s interview requests.

The researchers wrote that the publicly available supplied code of Internet sites also has a specific association with “Stoico”, the company’s web domain name. The GitHub user’s profile is not available, although as of Wednesday, online searches will continue to be affected.

development of fake accounts

For several months, a number of organizations have observed potential Israeli government-sponsored influence similar to the Gaza conflict. In January, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz Found that the Israeli government bought Generation to conduct online influence campaigns. In February, an undercover source decision researcher and then DFRLab identified a network of inauthentic social media accounts promoting content attacking United International Location Agency staff working with Palestinian refugees. FakeReporters found that messages from that community targeted Democratic Congressional nominees. In March, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, which researches disinformation around the world, conducted a community study focusing on Canadian voters, saying Canadian Muslims are increasingly pushing for a strict model of Islamic law. .

DFRLab notes the fake accounts that interact most with alternative fake accounts. Meta mentioned that he deleted the accounts from Facebook and Instagram before gaining any traction with the real crowd.

Broadly speaking, the campaigns were aimed at driving a wedge between Palestinians and complacent American citizens, says Miriam Aurag, an anthropologist at Westminster College in Britain and most recently a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Complex Study.

“Different oppressed groups are reciprocating the solidarity and affinity they have felt in a shared sense of oppression,” Ouragh said. She says the influence campaign is “a desperate attempt to break that unity.”

FakeReporter’s Schatz was involved in the anti-Islamic nature of much of the material posted through STOIC websites.

Schatz said, “Positioning Islam as a problem around the world is not something our state should be involved in.” “It’s promoting hate and promoting fear and promoting messages that, at the end of the day, I’m embarrassed by.”

The Fox reporter’s record on this occasion follows homogeneous reviews discounted from the last opportunity through social media corporate meta and artificial judgment corporate OpenAI. Both companies mentioned that they had given STOIC the solution to the bad fake accounts. OpenAI noted that STOIC outfitted its tools to generate articles and feedback, which fake accounts were used to distribute.

Current Israeli online influence operations

This opportunity is not as attractive as the influence operations of adversaries such as China, Iran and Russia, said Oragh, who has written about Israel’s public international relations efforts. Israel has been trying to influence the American people for years using virtual media. Is. relaxed me HasbaraOr “to explain” in Hebrew.

In 2009, an official at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told an Israeli newspaper that the branch was forming a team to promote Israel and garner global support, particularly after Israel’s war on Gaza, known as Operation Gaza. Was called solid. Top. The branch hired mobs who spoke foreign languages ​​like English to write messages on social media. Authentic cited the case affecting American citizens, and likewise noted that those employees did not want to see themselves on the run from Israeli authorities.

“People in Israel feel like they’re being attacked 24/7 on social media,” said Schatz of Israelis these days, “so many people find it a reasonable thing to do to strike back.” He said his group’s previous reviews of Israeli influence operations had little impact.

“The main countries which Hasbara Israel’s main funders, its main supporters, have traditionally been targeted. So Europe and North America,” Oragh advised NPR. The usual narrative in Europe comes with anti-Semitism or invocations of Arab terrorists, she says, “or in America – your 9/11 is our 9/11.”

Within the Gulf countries, Ouragh says, Hasbara The crowd needs to focus on their own affairs rather than Palestine. “Why don’t you worry about your financial problems, your struggles, your wars?”

Social media influence campaigns are probably the most effective methods Hasbara works, although Schatz said that spreading disinformation during war should not be done casually.

“You legitimize an act that is at its core manipulative and in many ways undemocratic, because you are pushing people’s decision-making away from reality,” Schatz said. “And they are being done by undemocratic countries or non-democratic countries (like) Russia or Iran. “I don’t know why we should take part in this.”

Itay Stern contributed to this story from Tel Aviv.