Exposed: Israel Secretly Targeted Black U.S. Lawmakers With Gaza War Influence 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 a private Israeli online political campaigning firm called STOIC that was hired for the project. 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.

[...] The campaign began with the establishment of three fake "news sites" that copied reports from official media sources. These sites had associated Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts, which amassed tens of thousands of followers. Meanwhile, the people running the operation used hundreds of avatars to aggressively promote purported articles that served the Israeli narrative, including reports about the sexual assaults by Hamas and about alleged ties between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and Hamas. The articles were mainly directed at the online accounts of Black lawmakers in the U.S., particularly Democrats.

[...] A network analysis found four other websites that used the same IP and promoted content designed for certain audiences. One was the United Citizens for Canada site, which had multiple social media accounts and disseminated heavily Islamophobic material, including claims that Muslim immigrants were a threat to Canada and demanding a sharia state. Another was the Arab Slave Trade site, which was copied almost entirely from Wikipedia and was aimed at Black Americans, trying to repeat the message that the Arabs had been slave traders in Africa. Yet another site was called Serenity Now, which branded itself as anarchist and anti-establishment, sought to convince young Americans to oppose the creation of a Palestinian state because "states are manmade structures" and a Palestinian state "would hurt the goals of the progressive movement."

[...] The report by OpenAI that uncovered the activity by Stoic dealt with exploitation of the company's ChatGPT AI platform for the creation of unattributed content for influence campaigns. [...] It was the first report by the AI corporation dealing with disinformation created using its systems [...]