Israel isn’t doing it justice: the Canadians should not be defarmed by digital media targeting of the Canadian government during wartime, says Oren
According to Aouragh, Israel has been trying to influence American people via digital media for a long time.
Several organizations have found possible Israeli government-sponsored influence activity in the past several months. The Israeli government bought online influence campaigns, according to an article published by Haaretz. The staff of the United Nations agency that works with Palestinian refugees were attacked by a network of inauthentic social media accounts. Black Democratic members of Congress were affected by the network’s messages. In March, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, which studies disinformation around the world, identified a network targeting Canadian citizens with narratives suggesting that Canadian Muslims are pushing for a strict version of Islamic law.
The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs didn’t reply immediately. The office denied it was involved in the campaign. The documents and people involved in the campaign were the source of the network of accounts.
Although the campaign did not appear to gain traction online, according to tech companies that also investigated it, Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, called for an Israeli investigation in response to the Times’ reporting. The campaign is an interference in the internal politics of our most important ally, and it will cause damage to the State of Israel during wartime, according to Oren.
Amichai Chickli, the Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs, tweeted a denial Wednesday about the alleged influence campaign. He accused fakereporter of defaming soldiers and Israel. NPR requested an interview with STOIC, but they did not respond.
One site claims American universities are unsafe for Jewish students while another suggests that Palestine isn’t a good idea. Common ownership could be inferred from the websites sharing the same address.
Being against the U.S. is stupid, says the CEO of FakeReporter. “Israelis should be worried because we can find ourselves easily targeted by these kinds of tools. I don’t trust these kinds of tools in the hands of anyone.”
Social media criticism of the Israeli online influence campaign aimed at driving a wedge between Palestinians and Black Americans: An anthropologist explains how the fake websites are deleting accounts from social media
The source code on the websites was found on Git, which is used to manage work. The source code refers to a GitHub user whose name is similar to a co-founder of STOIC.
Other fake accounts interacted with the fake accounts. Meta said it had deleted accounts from social networks before they gained any traction.
Broadly, the campaigns aimed to drive a wedge between Palestinians and Black Americans, says Miriyam Aouragh, an anthropologist at the University of Westminster in the United Kingdom.
Aouragh said that different groups are showing their solidarity with one another in the shared sense of oppression. She says that the influence campaigns are “a desperate attempt to break that unity.”
It’s not something that our state should be involved with, because it’s the problem of Muslims around the world. I’m embarrassed by the fact that it promotes hate and promotes fear.
Hasbara is not a Democratic Republic, but a Nation Is: How Does Israel’s Foreign Ministry and the State of Israel Operate on Social Media?
Last week there were reports released by the social media company Meta, and the artificial intelligence company OpenAI. Both companies said that they had taken down fake accounts. The fake accounts used to distribute articles and comments were generated by the STOIC.
An Israeli newspaper reported in 2009, that Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had set up a team to promote the country and rally international support in the aftermath of the war in Gaza. The department hired people to speak foreign languages to write in social media. The official said that those who work on behalf of the Israeli government don’t have to identify themselves, and that they could influence Americans as well.
The main funders of Israel are the countries that have traditionally been targeted by hasbara. So Europe and North America,” Aouragh told NPR. She said the common narratives include anti-semitism or the example of Arab terrorists and that’s why 9/11 is our 9/11.
In the Gulf countries, hasbara calls for people to concentrate on their own affairs instead of Palestine. I wonder why you shouldn’t worry about your own financial problems, conflicts and wars.
Schatz said that spreading misinformation should not be used recklessly during war, even though social media influence campaigns are just one of many ways hasbara operates.
“You give legitimacy to an act that is at its core is manipulative and anti-democratic in many ways, because you’re pushing people’s decision-making away from reality,” Schatz said. They’re being done by non-democratic countries. It could be Russia or Iran. I don’t know why we should take part in it.”