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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

#342
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Israel is not a democracy, a huge percentage of the populate cannot vote and have no civil rights or any sort. Let’s please stop repeating this falsehood. It’s propaganda and the facts are clear.

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> Given that designation as a separate state, complaining that they can't vote in Israeli elections is like complaining that Canadians can't vote in US elections.

I don’t remember the US ever occupying Canada.

Not like that at all, and this is a clearly biased take even considering this line on its own.

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> 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 res…

It appears the government has no clear strategy and lacks the famous "the day after" plan.

But from IDF side, it took two weeks to take over the whole border with Egypt. Rafah is empty and by the end of the month, it will be Israeli. So yes, they spent months not doing anything while the government was trying to secure hostage release and Biden was screaming do not touch Rafah.

But in general what strategy do you need? Take over, destroy the military infra and prevent smuggling. That's all that is needed. Gaza is thousand years back, it will never recover. It is not a threat anymore in any meaningful way.

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

#344

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 "…

Go to the Wikipedia pages of these events and click on "Talk" at the top or see the history of those pages. The amount of people fighting over this information war is mindblowing.

If anything, this makes me question the accuracy of historical events that happened before humanity had access to such tools.

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but just want to dispute the claim that NYTimes is somehow Israeli propaganda - I think it's clearly not.

The claim has some merit: https://theintercept.com/2024/04/15/nyt-israel-gaza-genocide...

> The analysis found that, as of November 24, the New York Times had described Israeli deaths as a “massacre” on 53 occasions and those of Palestinians just once. The ratio for the use of “slaughter” was 22 to 1, even as the documented number of Palestinians killed climbed to around 15,000.

You could copy this paragraph verbatim into Manufacturing Consent and it would fit in perfectly.

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

#346
post #275
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

My brain just came up with the phrase "You can't spell propaganda without PR", which I think is clever. But I'm going to put it into a search engine now and see that it's not original...

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

#347

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…

> 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?"

I think saying "evil" anything is wrong. But the UN is still a body made up of people, and like everything has its flaws. Its done some things that have turned out great and truly made the world a better place. Its done other things that haven't worked out so well. I certainly don't think it is above criticism.

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

#349

I'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 anecd…

This is not anecdotal come on. Worldnews is 100% now a narrative control ops by pro Israel forces. Just looking at one thread is enough to confirm this.

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

#350

Is there a country that doesn't do this?

Not the point here: Israel is our "greatest ally" and the target is our lawmakers.

"greatest ally" according to whose claim? that reads like propaganda, just plain nonsense. perhaps a contender for greatest external funding liability? not sure how the hard data would rank such numerically.
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