Israel secretly targets US lawmakers with influence campaign on Gaza war

TEL AVIV, Israel - Israel organised and paid for an influence campaign in 2023 targeting US lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging, as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the Gaza Strip, according to officials involved in the effort and documents related to the operation.

The covert campaign was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a government body that connects Jews around the world with Israel, said four Israeli officials.

The ministry allocated about US$2 million (S$2.7 million) to the operation and hired Stoic – a political marketing firm in Tel Aviv – to carry it out, according to the officials and the documents.

The campaign began in October and remains active on social media platform X. At its peak, it used hundreds of fake accounts that posed as real Americans on X, Facebook and Instagram to post pro-Israel comments.

The accounts focused on US lawmakers, particularly those who are black and Democrats, such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who is the House Minority Leader from New York, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, with posts urging them to continue funding Israel’s military. Representative Ritchie Torres, who is outspoken about his pro-Israel views, was also targeted.

Some of the fake accounts responded to posts by Mr Torres on X by commenting on anti-Semitism on college campuses and in major US cities.

In response to a Dec 8 post on X by Mr Torres about fire safety, one fake account replied: “Hamas is perpetrating the conflict,” referring to the Islamic militant group. The post included a hashtag that said Jews were being persecuted. On Facebook, the fake accounts were posted on Mr Jeffries’ public page and asked if he had seen a report about the UN employing members of Hamas in Gaza.

Mr Torres, Mr Jeffries and Mr Warnock did not respond to requests for comment.

ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, was used to generate many of the posts. The campaign also created three fake English-language news sites featuring pro-Israel articles.

The Israeli government’s connection to the influence operation, which The New York Times verified with four current and former members of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and documents about the campaign, has not previously been reported.

FakeReporter, an Israeli misinformation watchdog, identified the effort in March. Last week, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, said they had also found and disrupted the operation.

The secretive campaign signals the lengths Israel is willing to go to sway American opinion on the war in Gaza. The US has long been one of Israel’s staunchest allies, with President Joe Biden recently signing a US$15 billion military aid package for the country.

But the conflict has been unpopular with many Americans, who have called for Mr Biden to withdraw support for Israel in the face of mounting civilian deaths in Gaza.

The operation is the first documented case of the Israeli government organising a campaign to influence the US government, social media experts said.

While coordinated government-backed campaigns are not uncommon, they are typically difficult to prove. Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and the US are widely believed to back similar efforts around the world, but often mask their involvement by outsourcing the work to private companies or running them through a third country.

“Israel’s role in this is reckless and probably ineffective,” said executive director of FakeReporter Achiya Schatz. That Israel “ran an operation that interferes in US politics is extremely irresponsible”.

Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs denied involvement in the campaign and said it had no connection to Stoic, which did not respond to requests for comment.

The campaign did not have a widespread impact, Meta and OpenAI said last week. The fake accounts accumulated more than 40,000 followers across X, Facebook and Instagram, FakeReporter found. But many of those followers may have been bots and did not generate a large audience, Meta said.

The operation began just weeks into the war in October, according to Israeli officials and the documents on the effort.

Dozens of Israeli tech start-ups received e-mails and WhatsApp messages that month inviting them to join urgent meetings to become “digital soldiers” for Israel during the war, according to messages viewed by the Times. Some of the e-mails and messages were sent from Israeli government officials, while others came from tech start-ups and incubators.

The first meeting was held in Tel Aviv in mid-October. It appeared to be an informal gathering where Israelis could volunteer their technical skills to help the country’s war effort, three attendees said. Members of several government ministries also took part, they said.

Participants were told they could be “warriors for Israel” and that “digital campaigns” could be run on behalf of the country, according to recordings of the meetings.

Stoic was hired to run the campaign. On its website and on LinkedIn, Stoic says it was founded in 2017 by a team of political and business strategists and calls itself a political marketing and business intelligence firm. Other companies may have been hired to run additional campaigns, one Israeli official said.

Many of the campaign’s fake accounts on X, Instagram and Facebook posed as fictional US students, concerned citizens and local constituents. The accounts shared articles and statistics that backed Israel’s position in the war.

The campaign also created three fake news sites with names like Non-Agenda and UnFold Magazine, which stole and rewrote material from outlets including CNN and The Wall Street Journal to promote Israel’s stance during the war, according to FakeReporter’s analysis. Fake accounts then linked the articles on the so-called news sites on Reddit to help promote them.

The effort was sloppy. Profile pictures used in some accounts sometimes did not match the fictional personae they cultivated, and the language used in posts was stilted.

Last week, Meta and OpenAI published reports attributing the influence campaign to Stoic.

Meta said it had removed 510 Facebook accounts, 11 Facebook pages, 32 Instagram accounts and one Facebook group tied to the operation. OpenAI said Stoic had created fictional personae and biographies meant to stand in for real people on social media services used in Israel, Canada and the US to post anti-Islamic messages. Many of the posts remain on X.

X did not respond to a request for comment. NYTIMES