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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

#571

Post by zdragnar »

elfbargpt wrote: post #434
zdragnar wrote: post #299

I was part of a company that "hunted" terrorist groups that did this. Start with sympathizers publicly posting on Twitter, find who they are connected to, and fan out and cross reference to the people who are either organizing violence or running drug operations for funding. I assume most countries with designs in foreign politics do much the same.

Can you share what company that is? Palantir?

No, they were a competitor that pivoted away from government contracts to more commercial applications because there was too much red tape (palantir had some features that were interior according to our contacts but basically was already entrenched in the space by that point).

It has been a long while since I worked with them- the basic idea was that you could identify how people related to each other via their public posts, identify communities by topic, then identify how people influenced each other.

Some topics were harder to automate- if we took as an example b the keyword "abortion" you'll find multiple opposed groups. Searching for terrorists was somewhat similar- their public mouthpieces would use certain words, and their detractors would use the same words in opposition.

I won't go into too much further detail because while the company closed in 2022 I really respected the owners and I suspect they're going to find a way to bring the idea of the company back in a new form.

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

#573

Post by jedimind »

idunnoman1222 wrote: post #550
lenerdenator wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for them. But if you're Arab Israeli, you don't have the same slate of rights and representation that Jewish Israelis have. See: freedom of movement to and from the Gaza Strip prior to October 7th.

[flagged]

David Wasserstein, Professor of Jewish History: "Islam saved Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world. But it is a historical truth."

https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/so-what-did-the-muslims-do-f...

https://jewishstudies.stanford.edu/events/david-wasserstein-...

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

#574

Post by mardifoufs »

mathgradthrow wrote: post #37

Perhaps they are trying to achieve parity with the propaganda of their adversaries, Russia, China, and Qatar.

The difference is that Russia is sanctioned and basically treated as a hostile nation, and Israel gets subsidized arms, unconditional support and any attempt at boycotting it is met by state sanctioned punishments (at least if you are a federal or state employee in the US)

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

#575

Post by protocolture »

cjk2 wrote: post #543
CommanderData wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record I didn't verify the deaths, I looked at information release in past conflicts for the last 10 or so years *. "MoH statistics have also been verified by Human Rights Watch and used by the United States Department of State in past conflicts and as recently as March 2023, despite US President Joe Biden questioning those numbers without evidence." https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/14/has-the-un-really-…

[flagged]

His evil agenda of "please dont kill children" has been identified and discredited.

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

#576

Post by mardifoufs »

golergka wrote: post #41
greenavocado wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many congressmen are dual citizens with Israeli citizenship? This is even worse. Also, AIPAC is allowed to exist . As a thought experiment replace Israeli with Russian citizenship for the Israeli dual citizens in Congress and replace AIPAC with a hypothetical Russian ARPAC. Imagine how crazy this would be. Yet the current situation is somehow completely acceptable.

> As a thought experiment replace Israeli with Russian citizenship for the Israeli dual citizens in Congress and replace AIPAC with a hypothetical Russian ARPAC Is Russia the main American ally in the region that contributes enormously to American intelligence and R&D, while also supporting American military operations?

What operations did Israel support? If anything the US is over involved in the MENA area because of Israel. Before the cringy evangelical push for total support for Israel, the middle east wasn't hostile to the US. Actually the US was seen as the good guys (in the 50s and arguably 60s) because they were strictly pushing Great Britain and France for decolonisation.

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

#577

Post by protocolture »

pedalpete wrote: post #554
Simon_ORourke wrote: post #87

How are those guys not treated as some hostile foreign power and have half their embassy staff expelled is beyond me.

So would you also expel Russian and Chinese embassy staff? Allies influencing other allies is part of the process. Don't just think that it is Israel doing it in America. America is also doing similar actions in other countries where they want to win favour.

Russians are pretty close I would think.

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

#578

Post by partiallypro »

dylan604 wrote: post #312
partiallypro wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware how it works. But those numbers just aren't that compelling, because as I said every large social media platform is full of large troll farms. It's more about influencing actual constituents to write their Congress person.

We're just arguing semantics at that point though aren't we? If the purpose of the trolling is to influence a decision, does it matter if the target reads it and is trolled directly or trolls enough constituents to call for action? Either way, the influence was asserted making the effort worthwhile.

No, because there is little evidence it's effective, which is what I said. Israel has lost ground in polling in the US and all around the world as well. If anything, there's a huge backlash online against this sort of things to the degree that it goes overboard into blatant antisemitism.

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

#579

Post by mardifoufs »

wk_end wrote: post #68
greenavocado wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many congressmen are dual citizens with Israeli citizenship? This is even worse. Also, AIPAC is allowed to exist . As a thought experiment replace Israeli with Russian citizenship for the Israeli dual citizens in Congress and replace AIPAC with a hypothetical Russian ARPAC. Imagine how crazy this would be. Yet the current situation is somehow completely acceptable.

> How many congressmen are dual citizens with Israeli citizenship? I don't know. How many? I was curious and Googled, and couldn't find any good authoritative lists. This Quora answer [0] implies that the answer is zero, as does this Snopes article [1]. Both answers mention that there's various incorrect lists going around that are white supremacist propaganda. [0] https://www.quora.com/Which-current-members-of-Congr…

They have defacto Israeli citizenship because of the law of return, no? Not saying I agree with who you're replying to, but if a few dozen congressmen had the same status in Russia, wouldn't you see them as being connected to said country?

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

#580

Post by dragonwriter »

tradertef wrote: post #488
dragonwriter wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few. It contributes to, obviously, our foreign policy issues in the Middle East, but other than those specifically to deal with the Israel/Palestine crisis have lots of other contributing factors pulling in similar directions and probably wouldn't be that much better without the Israeli influence. Israeli influence is substantial, but it's fairly focused, and unlike other foreign hostile influence operations it…

I don't know if it is a big problem but people around the world, mainly in Muslim majority countries, hate US because of its unconditional support of Israel. Over long term, this is not good for the US.

> I don't know if it is a big problem but people around the world, mainly in Muslim majority countries, hate US because of its unconditional support of Israel.

They also hate the US because of the governments we do and have supported against popular will (and/or opposed despite popular will) for non-Israel reasons (oil being a big one) in the Islamic world.

Oh, and for directly killing a bunch of them, and torturing others, fairly recently in a series of wars -- including a very large one that was very clearly a war of aggression followed by a poorly managed occupation -- ourselves, not principally motivated by Israeli interests.

Like, if Israel vanished tomorrow, a very large number of the people that hate the US "because of its unconditional support of Israel" would hate the US just as much, even though they would have one fewer thing to cite as to why.

And, foreign issues aside, Israeli influence contributes a lot less to American internal problems than other foreign influence operations do.

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