{"id":1469969,"date":"2024-06-07T14:25:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-07T18:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1469969"},"modified":"2024-06-07T14:25:00","modified_gmt":"2024-06-07T18:25:00","slug":"israeli-government-funded-covert-influence-campaign-targeting-us-lawmakers-nyt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/israeli-government-funded-covert-influence-campaign-targeting-us-lawmakers-nyt\/1469969\/","title":{"rendered":"Israeli Government Funded Covert Influence Campaign Targeting US Lawmakers: NYT"},"content":{"rendered":"

Israeli Government Funded Covert Influence Campaign Targeting US Lawmakers: NYT<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Edward Carver via Common Dreams,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs organized and paid for a digital campaign to influence US lawmakers, especially Democrats who are Black<\/strong>,\u00a0The New York Times\u00a0<\/em>reported<\/a>\u00a0on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

The ministry allotted $2 million to the operation in October and hired Stoic, a Tel Aviv-based political marketing firm, to carry it out. Stoic established fake news websites and hundreds of fake accounts on X, Instagram, and Facebook that posted pro-Israeli messages<\/strong>, trying to push lawmakers such as Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the House minority leader, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) to fund Israel’s military and support its war efforts, the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0reported.<\/p>\n

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) speaks onstage at the March For Israel at the National Mall on November 14, 2023. Getty Images<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The influence campaign had been reported by a few news and nonprofit organizations in recent months, but the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0article, which drew from operation documents and interviews with current and former diaspora ministry officials, was the first to show that Israel’s government was behind it.\u00a0Haaretz<\/em>, an Israeli newspaper,\u00a0published<\/a>\u00a0a related story one hour later on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Critics condemned the Israeli government for its role in the disinformation campaign. “So in addition to the pro-Israel lobby spending tens of millions to defame and defeat progressives in Congress, we now learn that\u00a0Israel<\/a>\u00a0creates fake media to target friends and opponents by inundating with fake news supporting Israeli positions,” James Zogby, co-founder of the Arab American Institute,\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0on social media.<\/p>\n

The disinformation campaign comes amid other efforts by pro-Israel groups to influence U.S. politics during its assault on\u00a0Gaza<\/a>, notably the lobbying and campaign\u00a0money<\/a>\u00a0spent by groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC<\/a>)<\/strong> and its affiliates.<\/p>\n

The Israeli disinformation campaign also drew comparisons to Russia’s well-known attempt to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which was a central focus of the U.S. political commentariat in the years that followed. Ishmael Daro, an editor at\u00a0Democracy Now!<\/em>, made a tongue-in-cheek prediction that the reaction from the U.S. political establishment would be similar this time.<\/p>\n

Last week, both Meta and OpenAI issued reports on Stoic’s disinformation campaign and said they had blocked the company’s network from further activity<\/strong>. Meta said it had closed more than 500 fake Facebook accounts and OpenAI called Stoic a “for-hire Israeli threat actor,”<\/strong>\u00a0NBC News<\/em>reported<\/a>. Stoic’s users remain active on X, the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0reported.<\/p>\n

Many of the fake social media posts were generated using ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot owned by OpenAI, and much of the language in the posts was “stilted” and repetitive, the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0reported.<\/p>\n

The covert scheme has also been characterized as “sloppy” and “ineffective,” and it made little penetration with the general public or government figures<\/strong>. “We found and removed this network early in its audience building efforts, before they were able to gain engagement among authentic communities,” Meta wrote in its report.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0did not explain that the covert influence campaign was\u00a0discovered<\/a>\u00a0in February by the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) of the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, and\u00a0by<\/a>\u00a0Marc Owen Jones, a professor in Middle East studies and digital humanities at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar,\u00a0according to<\/a>\u00a0social media posts.<\/p>\n

Washington’s ‘Russian interference’ vs. ‘Israeli interference’ double standard on full display<\/strong>…<\/em><\/p>\n

Intercept’s @prem_thakker<\/a> & Matt Lee (@APDiploWriter<\/a>) teamed up & pressed the State Department on this. https:\/\/t.co\/GTVny0EqU1<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/sopC4H4yZZ<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 HalalFlow (@halalflow) June 5, 2024<\/a><\/p>\n

FakeReporter, an Israeli disinformation\u00a0watchdog<\/a>, followed up those initial discoveries with a March\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0on the campaign’s activities, including the fake social media accounts and creation of the online platforms\u2014Non-Agenda, The Moral Alliance, and Unfold Magazine\u2014that created or republished news from a pro-Israel perspective, focusing on, for example, purported links between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and Hamas. The findings were\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0Haaretz\u00a0<\/em>at the time.<\/p>\n

That Israel “ran an operation that interferes in U.S. politics is extremely irresponsible,” Achiya Schatz, the executive director of FakeReporter, told the\u00a0Times<\/em>. He characterized it to\u00a0Haaretz<\/em>\u00a0as “amateurish” and “anti-democratic.”<\/p>\n

FakeReporter in fact issued a second\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0on Wednesday showing that Stoic’s influence network may have gone further than the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0reporting shows. The watchdog group uncovered four additional websites, apparently Stoic-affiliated, that contain Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content. DFRLab had issued a\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0in March which also cited pro-Israeli disinformation and Islamophobic rhetoric, in that case targeted largely at Canadians.<\/p>\n

The new report concluded that the influence network has “apparently developed into a large-scale effort to target various groups, some outside the U.S….”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nFri, 06\/07\/2024 – 10:25<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/geopolitical\/israeli-government-funded-covert-influence-campaign-targeting-us-lawmakers-nyt<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Israeli Government Funded Covert Influence Campaign Targeting US Lawmakers: NYT Authored by Edward Carver via Common Dreams, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs organized and paid…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1469970,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1469969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1469969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1469970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1469969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1469969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1469969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}