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Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

haaretz.com

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Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#271

Post by nerdjon »

leoh wrote: post #266
nerdjon wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I am not, I am still engaging in the conversation. But there is very little I can actually say when your response is that it is anti-semitic. You are no longer responding to what was actually said and instead pivoting it to something else that does not leave anything to respond too since you are not addressing what you are responding too in the first place. And again you are doing the same thing here, instead of a…

> Do you find it concerning that no presidential candidate can even pass the primary without first kissing the ring of AIPAC? That Zionist lobby openly attacks insufficiently pro-Zionist candidates and then openly brags when they lose elections? With Zionist lobby trying to outlaw any criticism of Israel in direct violation of 1st amendment? Etc, etc. IDK about others, but I think this is insane. * foaming at the mou…

I... have no idea what your point is with this...

Edit: If I can figure out what you are trying to say

Was the person I responding too slightly exaggerating? Sure.

But we know for a fact that a lot of money flows from AIPAC to candidates that support strong ties with Israel. That isn't a secret. Saying that isn't anti-semitic.

If that is not your point, please let me know what it is so I can properly respond.

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#272

Post by megous »

cempaka wrote: post #130
nerdjon wrote: post #123

I find it quite concerning just how much propaganda the US seems to get from Israel. Where I live there are big billboards around, I regularly see ads on YouTube. I know propaganda is a thing, but it feels like we are getting more about a foreign government than our own. I feel like before what is going on now I was aware of some of the groups responsible for this being a thing, but was not fully aware just how much…

The best part is when it comes from our own "newspaper of record" i.e. with the extraordinarily dubious "mass rape" article the NYT published. They finally dismissed the one Israel-connected reporter who had liked tweets calling for a brutal response against Gaza, but that of course has seen about one billionth the attention that her original claims continue to receive. You also get stuff like the POTUS repeating lie…

> You also get stuff like the POTUS repeating lies like "40 beheaded babies" and "a mother and child had kerosene poured on them" with none of the usual media freakout you usually see over "misinformation."

Yeah. The politicians who repeated this also never apologized for inflaming tensions without any evidence or investigation whatsoever. But anything Israel is accused of, requires thorough investigation by Israel (or sometimes independently - without ever mentioning Israel will not allow independent investigators into Gaza), before we can even think about trusting the people they're killing currently, regardless of affiliation.

Then you read https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231215-israel-social...

And you see that 20 children 15 and younger were killed in total, and out of them 10 by rockets, which starts to paint very different picture. So militants killed 20-36 children depending on how you wish to define a child, out of 1200 people in total. So that's 1.7-3% of killed victims.

On the other hand, you get at least 16 000 killed children by Israel in just the last 8 months. 60 a day at least.

https://time.com/6909636/gaza-death-toll/

And you can see 10-5 a day individually just scrolling through video posts on telegram https://t.me/eyeonpal/

And we're supposed to think that Hamas are child killing monsters and Israel is not and somehow uniquely righteous. Yeah, right. Just the math alone on this doesn't compute for me, at all.

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#273

Post by cjk2 »

croes wrote: post #228
cjk2 wrote: post #70

Well their enemies used social accounts to garner support from US citizens so you've got to start somewhere! It's not like we haven't done this either. I worked for a company in 2005 which was doing this paid for by politicians. Moment I worked this out, I quit.

So it's ok to do something wrong, if others do it too?

It's a war. It's about doing wrong things until someone capitulates.

I mean it'd be nice not to have them but as a species we're stupid animals with stupid ideas so there's no end of it in sight.

I don't agree with any of it for ref.

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#274

Post by HL33tibCe7 »

davesque wrote: post #263

[flagged]

> Criticizing Israel is the like the "Anti Social Social Club" t-shirt of our time

Nice bit of deflection. It’s not even true, either. People are being blacklisted from companies for speaking out against Israel, their faces being paraded through streets with threats made against them. Speaking out against Israel comes with significant risk, particularly for politicians and journalists - the proof is in the pudding, when you look at their insanely soft-balled coverage of anything Israel does. Anyway…

> A political organization or world government is astroturfing on social media you say? And they're targeting lawmakers directly? Well, clutch my pearls!

Sure, if it was Russia or China I wouldn’t be surprised. But it’s Israel. The US gives Israel $1,000,000,000s and $1,000,000,000s of dollars per year and is supposedly Israel’s closest “ally”. _That_ is what makes this interesting.

I don’t really know why I’m bothering replying to you, given your incredibly thinly veiled bias. But here I am nonetheless.

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#275

Post by bostik »

dfxm12 wrote: post #162
SkipperCat wrote: post #4

Not a comment about who's right or wrong in this war, but it is fascinating that we have entered the age of the Internet being a place where warfare is fought. There have always been people posting web content about conflicts but now with Gaza and Ukraine, it seems that the nations fighting are actively looking at the internet as the fourth field of battle. Just waiting for a random US future president to create an "…

"Manufacturing Consent" was written in the 80s mostly in response to newspapers, but the ideas have been adapted to the Internet for some time (and talk radio, and cable news, etc.). I'm old enough to remember this from the Iraq war. Yeah, we didn't have microblogging back then, but there were Email campaigns, blogs, message boards, chat rooms, etc.

And let's keep in mind that the term "Public Relations" was explicitly chosen as a Newspeak-term because Edward Bernays realised that the actual term for a war time methodology, "propaganda", was too loaded.[0] And honest.

Internet is a communications medium. It was destined to be flooded with propaganda, whatever you try to call your particular flavour.

Or as I have been saying since the 1990's, the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#276

Post by vharuck »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #17
germinalphrase wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Espionage/propaganda/public relations/influence campaigns are hardly new. Social media is just a new flavor to go along with the others.

I do think the economy is different. You've always been able to just hire a bunch of thugs to stage an event to shape the narrative, like old-school cold war style. That takes money and effort and a modicum of skill and the risk of being caught with your pants down is not negligible. Difference today is you can stoke the flames of public outrage with just a few people, without even setting foot in the country, while…

People also seem to discount the effects of internet operations by enemy states. For example, in 2022, the FBI blamed the state of North Korea for a string of hacks on US health systems. The "meatspace" equivalent would've been North Korean operatives infiltrating dozens of hospitals and destroying records or supplies. If that had happened, there would've been a bigger response from the government than "Mind your physical security, hospitals." But it's the internet, so who cares (besides the people immediately affected)?

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#277

Post by cjk2 »

gmdrd wrote: post #234
cjk2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree (hence my point about quitting) but the problem is it's a difficult position to be in when everything is narrative driven and misreporting and propaganda are rife. You can sit there and do nothing and wait for your enemy to paint you in a bad light and the next thing you know your usual political allies are throwing money and aid at your enemy. Or you protect your citizens as best as possible by entering t…

> Or you protect your citizens as best as possible by entering the game. It doesn't seem reasonable to me to assume that the main objective of any government is to protect its citizens.

I think that's just paranoia. The citizens generally are the government. It's not optimal but without the citizens there is no government.

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#278

Post by ajross »

nerdjon wrote: post #151
ajross wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I struggle with not calling this propaganda: https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/18skzb0/ah_behold_o... https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/new-billboards-along...

Then you have a somewhat unconventional personal definition for "propaganda". Almost always people use that word to imply something clandestine, misleading, or both.

What you showed is a paid advertisement from a US-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, JewBelong, with public accounting on all donations, and a relatively clear mandate for how it spends its money.

Again, you're simply saying that a (really only slightly edgy) billboard paid for by your fellow americans with their own money and aimed at changing your opinion via argumentation should be disallowed as "propaganda" simply because you disagree with it (and again: I disagree with it too!).

Tough love: of the dueling philosophies at play here, yours is by far the most dangerous. Let people argue with you, for crying out loud.

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#279

Post by refulgentis »

SimbaOnSteroids wrote: post #229

The wild part about this, at least to me, is the wholesale incompetence demonstrated by Israel in this regard. If I couldn't google the talking points the bots make and see Israeli officials saying the same things, one would think these bots were Iranians acting with the intent to make Israel look bad.

It's a very interesting thing, it demonstrates something uncomfortable & scary to me as a goy Zionist, who hangs out in a private, predominantly Jewish, space.

Note the biggest word in the cloud: UNRWA. All my confirmation bias was in one direction in October. The oddly dissonant and desperate messaging you'd see made things extremely difficult to maintain that, like, you have to be of a very specific mindset to see message after message about the evil UN and not say, "uh, did we go off the rails somewhere?"

(n.b. this was in a lefty Jewish space, broadly denigrating governmental institutions isn't a usual virtue signal)

Going back to the beginning, there's an uncomfortable willingness/ignorance of Overton window widening, in a way that reduces sympathy rather than engenders it, and all of a sudden, otherwise kind people are engaging in rank racism*, glorification of destruction, and extreme conspiracies**.

* lots of "no such thing as innocent Palestineans", "Palestineans love redacted", when questioned, turns into "it's not racist if they're not a race, and they aren't because bla bla bla"

** Day after day after day of the bailey, "World Central Kitchen was trying to smuggle terrorists", coupled to the motte "Jose Andres held a barbecue buffet! Lol!"

Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers

#280

Post by HL33tibCe7 »

SimbaOnSteroids wrote: post #229

The wild part about this, at least to me, is the wholesale incompetence demonstrated by Israel in this regard. If I couldn't google the talking points the bots make and see Israeli officials saying the same things, one would think these bots were Iranians acting with the intent to make Israel look bad.

This is presumably just the tip of the iceberg
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