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Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers
321–330 of 807 posts
Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers
#322The 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.
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> IDF after the initial shock is doing great
From an outside perspective, this doesn't appear to be the case.
It's like that old management consulting saw: "Strategy without execution is useless — execution without strategy is aimless." Israel's actions appear to be entirely reactive; they're on the back foot, and they don't have a clear set of strategic objectives. Execution without strategy.
In essence, they're responded to one chevauchée raid with another chevauchée raid. It's only going to end in tears for all involved.
Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you propose we determine the fine line between the antisemitic "The Jews run the World" and "being critical of their actions"? What would e.g. be the piece of evidence that convinces you that we're dealing with antisemitism and not legitimate criticism? We shouldn't shut down conversations about Israel with antisemitism but we also shouldn't shut down conversations about antisemitism with "being critical of th…
Because the original post is about Israel using fake social media accounts to get US representatives to support genocide in Gaza. We’ve literally just passed some laws to _sanction the ICC_ for their daring to say anything negative about Bibi Netanyahu. Does the Arab lobby also have this kind of power? I mean, are you going to seriously argue that this is normal: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/03/aipac-israel-…
I'm not American so I can't comment on US politics but I feel like there's a small difference between "daring to say anything negative" and asking for arrest warrants (without jurisdiction as well). The Arab lobby seems to have plenty of power, e.g. it looks like they managed to make the US stop (or at least pause) shipping weapons to a long time ally that's being attacked and is at war.
There's list of different PACs here: https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs...
AIPAC is a lobbying group of Americans that think the US should have pro-Israeli policies. It's operating within the framework that many other lobbying groups are operating in. It's a large and influential group reflecting the large number of Americans that believe in pro-Israeli policies. I guess it's "normal" in any sense that US politics are "normal". Ofcourse Americans are more than welcome to pass laws to limit the influence lobbyists can have, like many other countries do.
Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers
#324The 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…
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Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your account has continued to use HN primarily for political battle after we asked you recently to stop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40519369 (May 2024) If you keep this up we're going to have to ban you, for reasons explained on many past occasions: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... . Edit for anyone concerned: yes, this principle applies regardless of which side of any politic…
Dang, We get you’re frustrated but he’s just stating his opinion. It’s not out of line relative to the other discourse in this thread.
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Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what's happening with the HN algorithm, but these anti-Israel, non-technology-related posts keep making the front page while e.g. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/security-insider/in... does not runarberg's comments are just a symptom of a deeper problem, dang
The algorithm is public https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013
That is a 14 year old HN post linking to a dead article, the comments on which say things like
> This is not the 'hacker news' ranking algorithm, this is the ranking algorithm distributed with 'ARC', which is the basis for the HN algorithm, but definitely not equal to it. The biggest missing ingredients are flagged posts dropping off quicker and posts that contain no URL dropping off quicker but there are quite a few other subtle tweaks.
Not really "public".
Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers
#327Not 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 "…
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
The US hasn't been especially loud about it, but it's been a dominant force in 'internet warfare.'
Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
somebody needs to pay for the billboard, or rent a hall to give a speech, or printing the flyers for your lost cat. How is money not essential to speech? Your proposal is that to support a cause, one should only be allowed to go outside and yell, because that's purer than the corrupting influence of money?
Once money gets involved, you inherently have a commercial interest. What's the ROI? I personally think people misunderstand to whom "freedom" is granted and defended in the US, it is demonstrably not freedom of the individual, but of the powerful.
money is quite simply not inherently commercial
free speech is a legal concept, and ROI is not a legal concept; when debts are enforced by courts, they frequently don't even enforce interest as if time value of money doesn't exist.
Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers
#329I'm sure the story is true, but I doubt it was effective. I don't think most politicians are really looking at their social media given most of it is trolling junk. I'm sure Russia/Iran/Hamas adjacent countries were doing the same. I just don't think they have been that effective in getting politician support. Direct lobbying or phone/email is much more effective than an online troll farm to get the attention of a po…
I would argue it is extremely effective.
Take a look a r/worldnews vs any other subreddit discussing this topic. r/worldnews is controlled. Negative comments towards Israel get comments deleted and users banned. Any other subreddit, there are people arguing from multiple directions. On r/worldnews, you only see dissenting opinions for the first hour or so until the mods "clean up the thread".
Obviously, this is anecdotal information and probably slightly biased.
Re: Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers
#330I 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…
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