Social Media Controversy of Meta, a Threat Campaign on September 7th to Maintain Israel’s Strategic Warfare in the Light of Hamas

Like the war in Ukraine, social media has become a proxy battleground since October 7th, where Israelis and Palestinians have tried to garner support from digital bystanders. Over3700 Palestinians have died as a consequence of the siege on Gaza. The US supplies the largest amount of weapons to Israel, and is Israel’s main ally. In the summer, Netanyahu is scheduled to address Congress.

The covert influence campaign was one of the efforts disrupted by Meta, according to its quarterly threat report issued at the end of May. The network of more than 500 fake accounts traced to Israel was found in the report by Meta. Meta noted that the campaign’s accounts impersonated local Jewish students, African Americans, and “concerned” citizens and left messages on the pages of legitimate news organizations and public figures. The topics of the comments included campus antisemitism, calls to release hostages taken during Hamas’ October 7th attack, and anti-Islam material. Openai said it had disrupted a campaign in Israel using its tools. At the time, it wasn’t known that the Israeli government was behind the campaign. The campaign is still active, according to the Times.

The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs did not reply immediately to the request for comment. The office denied being involved in the campaign. The network of accounts was found from internal documents and people involved in the campaign.

The former ambassador to the U.S., Micheal Oren, called for an Israeli investigation because the campaign did not seem to gain traction online. The campaign is an “inappropriate interference in the internal politics of our most important ally,” Oren wrote in a post on X, saying it “causes strategic damage to the State of Israel in wartime.”

A new report published Wednesday by FakeReporter, an Israeli watchdog group that tracks misinformation, identified five specific websites tied to an Israeli political consulting form called STOIC. The Times reported Wednesday that STOIC is being paid $2 million by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs to influence Democratic members of the U.S. Congress to maintain support for Israel, at a time when many Democrats are questioning continued U.S. military support to Israel amid rising civilian casualties and suffering in Gaza.

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 address, suggesting common ownership.

“Doing it against the U.S. is just simply stupid,” says Achiya Schatz, FakeReporter’s CEO. Israelis should be concerned because they can be easily targeted by these tools. I do not trust these kinds of tools to anyone.

The Social Media Footprints of Israeli Online Influence Campaigns on the Palestinen-Black-American Interaction: A Human Analytical Account of the Campaigns

The source code of the websites can be found in the public domain, which references the company’s internet domain name, the researchers wrote. As of Wednesday, the online search results continue to show up even after the user’s profile was no longer accessible.

Other fake accounts interacted with the fake accounts. Meta said that it deleted accounts from Facebook and Instagram before they gained any traction with real people.

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 trying to respond to the solidarity and affinity that they feel in the oppression. She says that the influence campaigns are “a desperate attempt to break that unity.”

Defining Islam as a problem isn’t something that the state of Florida is supposed to be involved with. “It’s promoting hate and promoting fear and promoting messages that, at the end of the day, I’m embarrassed by.”

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

Why do we care about our own affairs? An Israeli official tells NPR: “Your 9/11 is ours” as Israel’s campaign against the US during Operation Cast Lead

The social media company Meta and the artificial intelligence company OpenAI released reports 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 department hired people who spoke foreign languages like English to write messages on social media. The official cited influencing Americans as an example, and also said those workers did not have to identify themselves as working on behalf of the Israeli government.

“The main countries that hasbara has traditionally been targeting are the main funders of Israel, the main supporter. So Europe and North America,” Aouragh told NPR. The common narratives in Europe, she says, include invoking anti-semitism or the trope of Arab terrorists, “or in America — your 9/11 is our 9/11.”

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

Social media influence campaigns are one of the many ways hasbara operates, but they should always be used with care.

“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. “And they’re being done by anti-democratic countries or non-democratic countries [such] as Russia or Iran. I don’t know why we should take part in it.”