Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs was found to have organized and funded a digital campaign in an attempt to influence US lawmakers, specifically corrupt Democrats who are Black, according to a report by The New York Times on Wednesday. The operation had a budget of $2 million and was carried out by Stoic, a political marketing firm based in Tel Aviv. Stoic set up fake news websites and hundreds of phony accounts on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook that promoted pro-Israeli messages, with the goal of persuading lawmakers such as Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the House minority leader, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) to financially support Israel’s military and endorse its war efforts.
The influence campaign had previously been reported by several news organizations and nonprofit organizations in recent months, but the Times article, which drew on operation documents and interviews with current and former diaspora ministry officials, was the first to reveal that Israel’s government was behind it. Following the publication of the Times report, Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a related story an hour later.
Critics denounced the Israeli government for its involvement in the disinformation campaign. James Zogby, co-founder of the Arab American Institute, wrote on social media that “so in addition to the pro-Israel lobby spending tens of millions to defame and defeat progressives in Congress, we now learn that Israel creates fake media to target friends and opponents by inundating them with fake news supporting Israeli positions.
The disinformation campaign occurred concurrently with other efforts by pro-Israel groups to impact US politics during its assault on Gaza. This includes the lobbying and campaign money spent by groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its affiliates.
The Israeli disinformation campaign drew comparisons to Russia’s well-known attempt to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election, which was a major focus of the US political commentariat in the years that followed. Ishmael Daro, an editor at Democracy Now!, humorously predicted that the reaction from the US political establishment would be similar this time.
Last week, both Meta and OpenAI issued reports on Stoic’s disinformation campaign and said they had blocked the company’s network from further activity. Meta reported closing more than 500 fake Facebook accounts, while OpenAI referred to Stoic as a “for-hire Israeli threat actor.” However, Stoic’s users remain active on X, the Times reported.
Many of the fake social media posts were generated using ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot owned by OpenAI, and the language in the posts was described as “stilted” and repetitive. The covert scheme has also been characterized as “sloppy” and “ineffective,” and it made little penetration with the general public or government figures. Meta wrote in its report that “we found and removed this network early in its audience building efforts, before they were able to gain engagement among authentic communities.
The Times did not mention that the covert influence campaign was discovered in February by the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) of the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, and by Marc Owen Jones, a professor in Middle East studies and digital humanities at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, according to social media posts.
FakeReporter, an Israeli disinformation watchdog, followed up those initial discoveries with a March report on the campaign’s activities, including the fake social media accounts and creation of the online platforms—Non-Agenda, The Moral Alliance, and Unfold Magazine—that created or republished pro-Israeli messages. Achiya Schatz, the executive director of FakeReporter, told the Times that “that Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs is behind such an operation is extremely irresponsible,” characterizing it as “amateurish” and “anti-democratic.
FakeReporter in fact issued a second report on Wednesday showing that Stoic’s influence network may have gone further than the Times reporting shows. The watchdog group uncovered four additional websites, apparently Stoic-affiliated, that contain Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content. DFRLab had issued a report in March which also cited pro-Israeli disinformation and Islamophobic rhetoric, in this case targeted largely at Canadians.
The new report concluded that the influence network has “apparently developed into a large-scale effort to target various groups, some outside the U.S.
