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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

#591

Post by burkaman »

tzs wrote: post #584
burkaman wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is relatively common for people born outside the US to be elected to Congress ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foreign-born_United_St... , https://www.senate.gov/senators/Foreign_born.htm ), but there is no requirement to publicly disclose dual citizenship. Ted Cruz and Michelle Bachmann are the most famous examples of holding dual citizenship during a congressional career, there may be more examples that I…

Ted Cruz says he did not know he was a dual citizen. He said he assumed that because he was a US citizen by birth, left Canada at 4 and lived entirely in the US and never took affirmative steps to claim Canadian citizenship he was not a Canadian citizen. When a newspaper brought it up he went through the steps to formally renounce Canadian citizenship, which became official in May 2014.

I'm not accusing him of anything, I'm just saying he's one of two known cases. I don't personally consider it a problem and I wouldn't care if he hadn't renounced it.

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

#593

Post by bawolff »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #485
bawolff wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair, i maybe overinterpreted. I can understand why Israelis might be suspicious of the UN. The relationship between UN and Israel seems kind of fraught in a way that isn't true of pretty much any other country. The not allowing israel to fully vote until 2010 (edit: 2014), the (arguably) unequal focus only Israel's human rights record relative to other countries, and the whole UNRWA being totally different wi…

> the (arguably) unequal focus only Israel's human rights record relative to other countries Two thoughts on this: Firstly, every time a country is getting criticized for it's human rights abuses it, like clockwork, raises the spectre of being "unjustly singled out" about it's human rights abuses. To be clear, I would very much like every country on earth that engages in human rights abuses prosecuted for it, includi…

[flagged]

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

#594

Post by gruez »

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.

What's the incompetence? Having talking points? If you have a group of people trying to advocate for something, isn't "talking points" something you expect would arise organically? I'm sure YIMBYs have "talking points" as well (eg. how it'll reduce housing costs or whatever), but nobody would say that's "wholesale incompetence" for having them. Or maybe it's having it easily searchable? I'm sure if you search around you can find YIMBY bloggers on substack or whatever saying how good YIMBYism is. Aren't those basically "talking points"?

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

#595

Post by dang »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #527
dang wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posts on all sides of this topic get flagged quickly (by users), and mods turn off the flags on limited occasions—mostly when some significant new information arises and there's at least some chance of a substantive discussion about it. It's pretty important that most stories about this conflict and similar current affairs get flagged, because otherwise HN's front page would consist of little else, and that's not the…

Where I can view all of the posts that had flags turned off?

We don't publish lists like that, for reasons I've outlined over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... But we do answer questions about specific threads.

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

#596

Post by ein0p »

nsguy wrote: post #323
ein0p wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 PAC…

We get it, you’re a Zionist. Just say so outright. I’d like to think, however, that the US paused weapons shipments because Israel uses them to indiscriminately kill women and children, and commit ethnic cleansing of Gaza. I might be wrong on that account, but if I am, that’s utterly indefensible.

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

#597

Post by shiroiushi »

Terr_ wrote: post #287
bostik wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I disagree, ideologies are often already in there, even when they are simplistic "power-tools are for men and all men require power-tools", or "having better stuff than your neighbors is a virtue, failing to do so will lead to dang…

>I disagree, ideologies are often already in there, even when they are simplistic "power-tools are for men and all men require power-tools"

I disagree. This isn't peddling an ideology, it's using an existing ideology (or stereotype) in order to peddle a product. A company with a marketing campaign targeting men isn't going to refuse to sell power tools to women, they're just designing their marketing campaign in a way they think will maximize sales overall, using existing biases and ideologies that potential customers already have. Normal companies don't care about ideology unless it helps them make more money, which is their true goal.

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

#598

Post by throw10920 »

cyclecount wrote: post #14

[flagged]

I flagged the story because it's uninteresting politics that doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity.

I flagged your comment because it's anti-intellectual nonsense that attempts to emotionally manipulate readers and is unfounded in reality. Please keep that kind of thing to Reddit.

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

#599

Post by shiroiushi »

dylan604 wrote: post #457
tredre3 wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to what purpose was the curfews imposed? The stated purpose was to flatten the curve. > Who benefited? The government. > How? By giving the impression that they were doing something. > Why were the curfews necessary to achieve those goals? They weren't, as far as we know. In Quebec's case they were still scrambling to justify them a few hours before the press conference: https://www.thesuburban.com/news/legault-s-c…

[flagged]

The only people who can tell you the actual purpose of an action taken are the people who actually took that action. Everyone else can only speculate.

How curfews can slow the spread of a virus, I have no idea. If you want to slow a virus's spread, you do it by isolating people and preventing them from mingling. A curfew doesn't do that; it just forces them to mingle during a shorter number of hours in a day, which if anything helps the virus spread by increasing the density of people mingling. The allegation that it was just governments trying to look like they're doing something useful is not an unreasonable charge. Any idiot can tell you that preventing someone from going on a bike ride in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere is not going to help stop a pandemic, but this is exactly what several governments did.

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

#600

Post by 1shooner »

Retric wrote: post #251
1shooner wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of free speech, can you name another foreign interest that has managed to make it illegal in the US to boycott it's companies?

“Texas enacted a law in May 2017 prohibiting state agencies from signing contracts with companies that boycott Israel.” I’m not particularly happy about that law or similar ones in other states, but what you said is inaccurate.

It's a law designed to stop and prevent the individual political speech of US citizens, call it what you will.

My point was that there is a foreign country that has successfully written laws (using a 'model act', i.e. copy-paste) for 38 US states that is not intended to serve the interest of US citizens, but that of the foreign country. I'm not aware of any other examples of that amount of reach by other countries or foreign interests. Maybe petrochemical/energy?

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