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

The NYTimes also reported about an alleged Israeli strike on a hospital killing hundreds despite it ended up being a Hamas failed rocket.

It seems to me the the NYTimes is trying to be somewhat objective but just gets stuff wrong occasionally.

I have struggled to even look at my News app anymore.

Next to articles about the protests or other things, there are the articles about the hostages or something else that just feels like a propaganda piece aimed at one thing.

And that is just the headlines.

I hope you two realize that it’s exactly this kind of rhetoric that has led to Israel putting so much money, time, and effort into defending their reputation

Antisemitism is a very very old problem

100% yes.

TBH when I said "propaganda" I was grouping a lot of that under that when I should have been more specific.

But that and similar things is what I was referring to with "I don't understand how this much power over the US was ever deemed acceptable".

I remember seeing the articles about them funding the campaign of someone opposing someone else who had been critical if Israel. I don't remember which state or what position, but it wasn't just a one off either.

Free speech sometimes applies to things you don’t like.

...and in the United States we've defined down "free speech" to include "monetary donations."

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?

I believe the issue here is how much sway Israel has on the US and how rabid many US politicians are about Israel (to the point where many straight up accuse you of anti semitism if you just criticize the country or their policies)

Also issues like where you are not allowed to refuse to work with Israel if you are an arms manufacturer in the US (but you can refuse to work with the US military). I know that part of that is due to Israel being part of the FMS list but they are also the largest recipient on it...

I can't prove that these are somehow connected to funding from Israel, but it seemed like these billboards were ready to go at a moment's notice.

Right, that is what we got in Boston. The timing is just too convenient.

Whether or not it is from Israel themselves or funding here for Israel is kinda a moot point when both have the same purpose: Propaganda for a foreign government.

Well it can’t be China because China don’t kill their muslim popula… oooh…

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...

The holocaust came of age in the dawn of the information age if you count the radio as information technology, albeit a very one-sided information technology where you had the government giving everyone cheap radios that were only marked to tune to German and Austrian radio stations, unless you dared to go out at night to get an antenna up to receive others. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger

Its not at all, even if you mean “social media age”, and not “information age”, it's just one of the first (there are other disputed candidates, e.g., in Ukraine) that are getting first world attention other than after-the-fact.

The Rohingya genocide in Myanmar in which Facebook’s role was widely discussed (largely, in the first world, after the fact) was probably the first social media age genocide, if you don't restrict it to ones with immediate first-world attention at a significant level.

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 political conflict an account is identified with.

I think you got this the wrong way around. It's the first time in the information age that a country [is] forced to yield a war via false claims propagated through social media.

A lot of people have both mechanisms to record what's happening, and share it.

It's been that way with Syria conflict, too, though. A lot was shared in twitter/youtube during that one.

One thing that's seemingly a bit new is how much ordinary Israeli soldiers are sharing their behavior, empowered by their self-righteousness, I guess. Videos from shooting unarmed deaf people up close in their homes, to all kinds of calls for atrocities, actual assaults on international humanitarian aid trucks and violence against the drivers, cheerful mocking of starving people, dedicating videos of them blowing up peoples homes as gifts to their spouses back home in Israel, looting and stealing, wanton destruction of property (like going around and breaking things in someone's gift shop), burning people's houses down, etc. There's so much of this.

Entire 130k strong Israeli telegram channels are dedicated to collective cheering on and mocking of dead and suffering people: https://t.me/s/dead_terrorists Total dehumanization.

Tigray region and Mynamar are two earlier candidates.

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 maintaining a lot of plausible deniability, since the modern playbook relies heavily on uncertainty and confusion, meaning you can safely target allies without significant risk of being caught (even if you're caught, you can deny it and say it's hostile propaganda).

Indeed and one reason i don't watch or pay attention to news media(TV, online, etc) especially political news. What to believe is real / the truth and with the advent of AI, Deep fake voices and deep fake videos the Internet becomes an even worse place for deciphering truth.

Here's AI Trump and AI Biden debating live now on Twitch (video isnt great as of today but the voices are) https://m.twitch.tv/videos/2157689323

That's much more oriented to network security, spectrum and hardware, stuff like that. For an American military organisation engaged in internet influence operations you'd want to look at the signature reduction program. Something like 50,000 people strong at this point, insane amounts of resources going into that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cyber_warfare_forces

A cursory look and it seems Germany and China were first to having a specific branch, but China dissolved theirs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_and_Information_Domain_S...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army_Str...

Canadian government was the source of misinformation on social media during the pandemic! Literal curfews were in place with propaganda machine saying how good idea it was.

How many congressmen are dual citizens with Israeli citizenship?

Zero? I can't find a reliable source for any congress member being an Israeli citizen

"How many congressmen are dual citizens with Israeli citizenship"

By this do you mean Jews? Should be prevent Jewish people from being allowed in congress?

"AIPAC is allowed to exist" Should we prevent it from existing becuase it supports a Jewish state? You have no issue with the hundreds of other lobbying groups, just the jewish one.

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?

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-Congress-have...

[1] https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/02/05/dual-citizenship-elec...

To my knowledge, zero. If you really mean Jews, I think there are roughly 40 between both houses of Congress. None of them are Israeli citizens. Jews are not automatically citizens of Israel though they do have dedicated pathway to obtaining it, but it's not as simple as merely showing up and claim you are Jewish.

The problem is that we've already solved these issues many times over on other sites that are decades old. HN simply refuses to implement 21st-century forum enhancements.

Brigaded reports? 4chan solved it by adding a mandatory enum to reports to specify what the report is reporting for. Identifying bad reports and banning users as a result becomes trivial.

Flooding with stories about a particular topic? That's what stickies are for and they work particularly well so that mods can auto-delete any non-sticky stories pertaining to the MOT.

Flamewar on a MOT? Add a sticky to the top of the thread like reddit does saying moderation will be minimal and to enter the thread at your own risk.

Reasonable approach and I applaud your effort to maintain the site's purpose while also not ignoring these issues (that do have some relation to the tech industry, as we've seen). Thank you.

Thank you dang. Doing the lords work.

Thanks Dang this is much better than previously.

Thank you for the explanation.

Appreciate the case by case basis approach to moderation here. There are quite a few topics where discussion becomes suppressed when blanket bans are enforced.

Maybe that is just the dregs of a time when they used to be half decent at propaganda ;)

I take it back. They are smart with their hacking and that’s where it ends.

Yea, US propaganda is the same way. It's not subtle, it's just so many people are onboard with it they don't really care.

My wife lived in Israel on and off for years, I got to visit her for awhile during her dissertation work in the West Bank. Only a few blocks of Tel Aviv deserve the "modern Middle Eastern country" label in my mind. And even then it wasn't nearly as impressive as I thought. Haifa is a lovely town though :)

As a group, Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of around 110. If you subtract Palestinians from Israel (group average IQ of 83) and other Jewish groups that make up the remaining 70% of the country (group IQ around 90), Israel probably would be the smartest by far. But yeah, overall fairly typical when you mix all the groups.

The only good thing to come from Brexit is that for some people they woke up and smelt the more expensive coffee than it used to be and had some self reflection. I have spoke with a good few people now that were like ‘I was lied to’… well duh.

I am in my upper 60s--if a bit junior for Congress, let alone the White House--but like to think of myself as a bit more skeptical than that.

Aside from the terminally online politicians (like Mike Lee, AOC, Cruz, MTG) most do not use their own accounts or even look at them. They might have a firm that measure constituent engagement, but still to this day the most effective way to complain to your congress person is a phone call or email. If we're being serious, the latter is what these bot farms, etc are after. They want to influence actual constituents to do their ultimate bidding. Now if we can get evidence of a huge phone campaign using AI voice, that would be much more alarming. Israel is doing it, and Iran/Russia/Hamas adjacent are doing it. There's absolutely no denying it.

So the logic is something like this:

* my grandmother can't recognize fake information

* my grandmother is old

* politicians are old

* therefore politicians can't recognize fake information

Politics has always been full of deception, people doing politics professionally for decades should know a bit or two about it.

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.

Did you thought about clicking on the hide button that is next to "flag" as an alternative?

JIDF turned out to be one guy. That was a sideshow.

This article is from Hareetz, which is a major newspaper in Israel.

There's a huge, organized Israel lobby aimed at the US. It's no secret. There's AIPAC, the American-Israel Political Action Committee. "Lobbying for Pro-Israel Policies", it says on their web site. There are official organizations in the government of Israel which do "public diplomacy".[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_diplomacy_of_Israel

before the US entered WWII the british had an office of propaganda with offices in New York that was dedicated to getting the US to enter the war.

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 the game. The moral high ground may have a higher body count.

This point applies to both sides for ref. And because it's a war, the rules of fair play go out of the window until people are on trial afterwards.

Isn't the US already in a (barely-proxy) war with Russia?

Yes, but Israel is our Greatest Ally, so it's different when they do it.

There is some discussion here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40587325