DISINFO

Israeli Government Using Bot Farms to Target Black Lawmakers With Propaganda: Report

The Ministry of the Diaspora spent $2 million to quietly seed bot farms on major social media websites, according to a report.

Since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs has unleashed a slew of bot users on social media websites to spread Israeli propaganda, often targeting Black U.S. lawmakers’ posts, The New York Times reported Wednesday, citing documents and Israeli officials. The ministry paid $2 million to Stoic, a political advocacy firm, to launch the campaign, the Times reported. Stoic created fake news sites such as ‘UnFold Magazine’ and ‘Non-Agenda’ which were populated with rewritten articles from other publications that affirmed the Israeli narrative on the war in Gaza. FakeReporter, a site that reports bot accounts spreading propaganda, originally identified the influx of accounts spreading stories from these sites, among other fake sites promoting racist and fictitious stories, across X, Instagram and Facebook in April. The campaign also targeted primarily Black and Democratic lawmakers with spam posts from fake accounts promoting Israeli propaganda, according to the Times. The accounts also used ChatGPT to write posts with identical phrases popping up on many of the accounts. Both ChatGPT and Meta confirmed the Times’ and FakeReporter’s investigation.