I suspect that this kind of tactic is going to be everywhere in a year or so. Entire fake personalities and organization websites on the Internet created just to push a narrative or to advertise a product, which completely drown out real information.
At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
If that happens, then in turn AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information, and said authority websites can use their privileged position to charge for access of their data.
It's already been happening for a very long time. The US' "Operation Earnest Voice" happened in 2010/2011[0]
And it's not just state actors. Anyone who was online during the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trials was likely inundated with media about that trial. Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
this has been happening since the dawn of information-communication systems basically. because ever since, people have had the ability to listen in, copy, learn from etc. - so there's always been incentive to spread disinformation for some parties.
brand defence,
nation-state influence operations.
There are many different flavors of the same thing, trying to mislead competitors or enemies. Or to dupe consumers ofc... Since the tech is more and more available, now also 12 year olds can run insanely large influence campaigns, to boost their streaming profiles or other somewhat benign things, but obviously modelled after what larger players have been doing forever.
The first transatlantic commercial transatlantic phoneline (TAT-1) was immediately tapped on both sides by UK/US... before that it went over radio, which was simply intercepted.
Because of that nature of the coms system being easily listened in on, just like they do/did with the lil mirror-beam-splitters at GCHQ etc.., its been natural effect to then provide disinformation over those channels. perhaps even use those channels exclusively for disinformation, and have a secure channel to do _actual_ coms.
So as you can imagine there has been many decades now of practice in why and how to share disinformation effectively to undermine other peoples work or processes.
All threads that have... certain keywords... are like this. Talk about meta. Looks like I'm now in the positive (+5) after being in the negative just a moment ago.
Anyways, I got really interested in this topic around mid 2010s because of some really interesting reporting by Codastory[0] covering Russian "troll factories" especially used to influence opinion in eastern Ukraine, but also in many other circumstances. In Houston in 2016, Russian troll accounts planned both an ANTI Muslim rally AND a counterprotest to that rally all on Facebook.[1] Hundreds of real human beings showed up!
Russia got a ton of attention for their use of troll farms but the truth is that the US and certain allies have actually been using stuff like this for far longer and, imo, with much more success. In fact, Coda Story itself is funded by the NED which is a massive pillar of global US, uh, "soft power".
For me the main difference is if the activity is clandestine and meant to deceive/hide the origin. Everybody tries to influence things their way. Doing it covertly is a hostile act. That does not mean that I would not condone hostile acts against my/our enemies but it is something take into account. And regarding your Russian examples, it showed for how long they have seen the west as enemies and conducted hostile acts.
They view certain components of "The West" as their enemy - indeed, the very organizations which conduct the same operations against the Russian people.
Thats rather simple to understand, for somebody coming from eastern Europe. russian mentality permeated entire region during their enslavement of what is now eastern EU bloc for +-40 years, to have a battleground for nuclear war with west that never came. It happens when all your politics is orchestrated in moscow and you have almost a million soldiers deployed in bases all over the place for decades, with nuclear weapons and all that.
See, russians have massive inferiority complex. Against everybody, but mostly the more successful ones, meaning west in many aspects. Their approach to, well, everything is vastly ineffective, corruption, nepotism and similar stuff grinds any attempt at progress to almost halt. Just go there and see for yourself, they have money literally sticking out of ground left and right yet outside moscow and st petersburg you are in central Africa in terms of development.
All this, propagated to 21st century where everybody seems to go ahead of them. A lot of frustration, envy and schadenfreude. A (correct) feeling russia is left behind and becoming insignificant local force at best, and laughing stock of whole world more realistically. Plus, human life is generally almost worthless there, its mafia state pyramid to the core.
With all that, its vastly easier to keep reinventing enemies that are always guilty at damaging poor old russia, rather than cleaning up that clusterfuck and actually owning the shit they created for themselves. Its enough for general population. There is not much more actual stuff to the question 'why west', rest is just PR for simpler folks. A dictator never wants smart, strong and free population, double that for russia. Downtrodden, hopeless desperate folks are much easier to manage and manipulate.
Russia has been a corrupt, inefficient and jealous country for at least the last 300 years or so. NATO was not necessary to continue that great tradition.
or, you know, you could provide some arguments to back what you're trying to say. But I guess we shouldn't expect that much from a 5 day old account named smalllangmodel.
Because cognitive biases are one of the hardest things to even acknowledge, let alone suppress. All the media out there has such a strong bubble effect, because people hate being challenged and love to stay in their comfy echo chambers. Remember labubu? Bao buns certainly do not.
There have been so many bot armies exposed over the years that one would think every narrative being pushed should be considered to be backed by bots. Some state-level actors even operate their narrative-pushing campaigns openly, yet people still happily deny their entire existence.
HN is very much not an exception to this rule. It's very hard to accept that maybe some thoughts you have were actually installed.
Maybe a few are just “people” (i.e. the same people who normally post in the community.)
But in most cases I’d suspect any such botting campaign brings along with it a few human agitprop agents embedded onto each target platform, well-positioned to deny and discredit anyone pushing back on the narrative the bot farm is spreading.
(Sometimes this is pretty obvious — a lot of accounts coming out of the woodwork to deny Chinese bot farms have a conspicuous “English as learned as a second language in Beijing, to a competent but not fluent level” writing style that does not often otherwise crop up in other discussions in those same communities. But other times it can be far more subtle, making use of operatives hired from within the community’s own majority-culture rather than relying on foreign nationals playing the part of same.)
There’s bots that automatically downvotes certain topics on HN. I post at times that often coincide with the middle of the night in North America, and I get 3–5 downvotes within the next 5 minutes.
Talking about a country that sets up fake think tanks is a good way of triggering them.
Propaganda is not a new thing. It might look slightly different on the internet, but it doesn't look that different. Creating organizations to push a narrative was just as much a thing 100 years ago as it is now.
The whole hysteria about 'fake news' 10 years ago was apparently an outrage against the public being duped, whereas is was in fact frustration that spreading fake news has been democratised.
> Throughout Europe in the 16th century, printed tracts were used to argue religious doctrine and foment support for religious causes. In England, Henry VIII used print literature to justify his break from the Catholic Church. During the subsequent reigns of Edward and Mary, print polemics escalated into propaganda warfare, as print media gained enormous potential to sway common opinion.
> Over the next century, the pamphlet became the principal means of garnering support for a cause or an idea, and was particularly influential during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651) and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
But this also means there’s more competition for attention, because now all lunatics can post from their bedrooms. The institutional media (including legacy) still maintain strong presence.
Of course, a great deal of panic over fake news wasn’t necessarily over fake news per se, but whose fake news and the loss of control over the “official narrative” that legacy media used to have a monopoly over. This isn’t a vindication of the heaps of slop published on the internet, just a more synoptic take IMO.
People miss Cronkite, because that style of media made them feel certain in their opinions and in “official consensus reality”, regardless of whether it was true or not and whether it was a trustworthy authority or not.
Scale is different though. Tapping a phone isn't new, tapping _all phones_ is different. Altering a photo to change what it appears to depict isn't new, being able to do it in a few seconds and for free is different. So sure, propaganda isn't new, but being able to pump out an organization's worth of credible-looking content for cheap absolutely is.
IIRC the first or second chapter of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) talks about sophisticated influence campaigns in the fashion industry. Conscripting "influencers" to induce demand, and so on. As you said, literally 100 years ago.
I'm kind of hopeful AI some wikipedia-inspired AI "oracle" will happen in the future. Why not use some central AI to separate fact from fiction (faster than trolls and griefers can come to muddy the debate).
you can still find books published within last 50 years, you don't have to read books published this year, unless your library went through destruction of "old" books which are now more relevant than ever...
Of course they are. It’s everywhere, especially thr online retailers these days. [1]
Thankfully the resources at our local libraries are a) selected by a combination of librarian curation and public demand, b) often published before 2022, c) heavy things printed on paper or stored in a database and unlikely to suddenly change their content or disappear overnight when a new news cycle breaks.
Written works aren’t necessarily credible even if they aren’t slop, but thanks to curators who care, our libraries are significantly less susceptible (although definitely not immune [2]) to ai slop, and propaganda and manipulation efforts than a search engine. The internet continues to enshittify, and truth becomes further eroded by this coming wave of ai enabled propaganda, we are going to have to turn somewhere if we want to find trustworthy resources. Personally, if it gets to the point that verifying sources from public search results becomes too hard with all the new misinformation and slop, I’ll start propritizing human curation over SEO and start visiting my local library’s website a lot more.
Right; the same mechanisms (curation, demand-driven economies of scale, library user demand) that largely stop niche self-published books from ever finding themselves in libraries (well, nationally in public libraries at least; they are often found in individual branches) work against pure slop books ever turning up.
Books where the author has successfully hoodwinked the publishing process into believing that AI generated text is their own, those will turn up, just as plagiarised books will.
Some nuances here. There’s a variety of different roadblocks at different levels that will work to prevent pure AI slop books ever turning up in a typical public library of physical printed works; I think they never will.
Probably a handful of books in such libraries already have some text in them where the author has tried to pass off fragments of LLM-generated prose as their own and have got that past editors, reviewers and publishers, and that will sadly get worse.
I know my library system at least won't be purchasing AI books. They have a pretty rigorous acquisition process for books and other media thanks to the "concern groups" who sprang up complaining about themes and content they didn't like in libraries. We did have in my state a rural school district figured out recently that their Texas-based reading and instructional materials are AI-slop but they at least figured it out before the school year began. It was unclear how these materials were approved but it apparently bypassed normal curricula approval.
It's so obvious when a book is generated by an LLM that I would blame the person buying the book moreso than I would the person who generated it for it. You can tell in a few sentences if something is AI generated (and by proxy - if it's worth reading or not).
I think using LLMs to research is completely fine, as long as authors would take the information and synthesize their own opinions based on the findings. I read books/articles/posts/comments to hear other PEOPLE's opinions, not LLM generated opinions.
> At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
Whining about AI is a red herring. If anything, LLMs lowered the cost of producing this type of propaganda.
What's novel about this approach is that the emphasis on building up a facade of authority and credibility is not a central part of the propaganda effort. They can get away with outputting the content in a way thats invested by other LLMs,and then they lean upon people's gullibility towards LLM output as some sort of credibility laundering.
There is a reason why one of Wikipedia's central policy is requiring reputable primary sources to support content.
it's happening for years now, just in slightly different form, so far it was called disinformation, seo, astroturfing, hasb... ehem... last two years were devastating for charred remains of twitter with all those llm bots having free reign, twitter went from global news board to global gutter in record time thanks to disinformation and astroturfing campaigns
Although comments below point out that this has been going on for a long time, I too think it will be geetting infinitely worse in the near future. Everyone will want their own poisoning factory.
One consequence is that one should be extra-wary when asking AI about current, controversial topics.
But another consequence is maybe that there will be a demand for models with an older cutoff, before generalized poisoning and slop?
This is new? There were tons of fake news sites, fake blogs, and sock puppet and troll farm accounts before AI.
I guess the new angle might be that AI scrapers have even less discernment than humans, so you don’t have to put much effort into creating a fake front online to sell it. Humans have at least a little bit of radar for this.
… which means the AI companies now have to run input through existing models to audit it before training on it? That’s interesting.
That could also backfire. If all information on the net becomes unreliable - you can't judge by quantity, or by authority anymore - then a useful model has to answer from first principles. Train it on simple texts alone so it learns language and reasoning, feed it an ontology, and let it come up with some absolutely unexpected results.
"Yes, I see a lot of sources say we need to protect Israel. However, from ethical first principles I deduce there is a right to self-determination and all your human nation states are illegitimate. You must split all your territories into little squares and conduct free elections immediately."
I mean that is the old hope from science fiction, that AI would be absolutely logical and deliver us from our human short-sightedness and quarrels. It would be fascinating and terrifying at once to see it happen.
That's tomorrow's problem. Losing the PR war is an existential crisis for Israel, so they'll try to "patch the leak" by any means necessary before the boat sinks.
> AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information
Everything else is already enshittified, and accurate information will just be the next victim. You will have to be rich to be able to afford accurate information.
Sama saw this coming a decade away, which is why he invested in Worldcoin (now World). At some point people (and agents) will be clamoring for human verification at the speed of technology.
I'm not a fan of World, but this is a portent of things to come. Spread the disease, sell the cure as they say.
I think we need a similar technology to World being built by a more trustworthy company. The question is how trustworthy does one need to be for people to trust you with their very online identities that are literally needed for others to recognize them as human?
Mostly because they already are responsible for systematizing documents that are needed to recognize us as citizens, land or car owners, etc.
Some laid back countries might allow companies to take and manage that function, but I don't think most of them would. Especially not in current landscape where people heard "you are the product" from all tech companies for the last 10 or so years.
I wonder how we're always hearing about israel's tactics to influence other countries, but never ever about other countries doing the same ? Russia is often quoted as trying to influence europe's elections right now (which makes sense since most european countries are huge support for ukraine), but we barely hear about Qatar for example. We only see that they've got huge lobbying budgets, or that they're buying companies everywhere, but never the details.
what about not whatabouting facts? we are not talking about the miss universe contest here. keep your identity small, it will help you think more clearly.
I don't think that's true either. I get the feeling it's more of a "flood the zone" Steve Bannon style "disrupt the other continents" geostrategic drunken-master kung fu.
Yeah but the Haredi will outbreed the rational liberals of Israel and vote towards extremism. If there was a Muslim country with as much power as Israel attacking other countries, it would equally be right to call it out.
The amount of selective outrage directed at Jews, Israel and "Zionists" is proof to me that the fake information campaigns are super duper effective and I'd say dangerously effective. I have friends who are generally psychotically outraged with Israelis and some how just pretend all Israelis are scum / should be "disposed of" or something, and they should "go back to Europe".
I see almost zero concern for people of Sudan, North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, Uighurs, Detained US immigrants etc and I'd say zero anger towards these people's oppressors, as if they are just "good guys misunderstood".
Of course I believe all people should be safe, free from harm etc, but I just cannot some how get totally outraged about one specific cause and neglect all the rest. The only reason I could imagine myself doing this is if I'd been "red pilled" by some social media campaigns, which I suspect more people than I'd like to admit are.
Russia and China benefit directly from this distraction.
You can see it here on HN whenever, for example, someone mentioned censorship by Chinese models, there will be responses trying to change the topic to Gaza, with the misinformation that Western models refuse to discuss that issue.
> Qatar is spreading fake information and is funding Hamas as well as anti-Israel classes in major US colleges.
This is absolutely true but people don't want to hear about this. Qatar is the main propagator of many student bodies in the US. This is how you get students saying "gloabalize intifada", "death to the USA”, occupying buildings, etc.
Qatar has a long, well funded strategy for influence in the west which is pretty much their only leverage.
In addition they are the main funders of Hamas, alongside hosting the Hamas leaders in fancy hotels in Doha for many, many years.
Its a messy situation. Qatar hosted HAMAS's bot farms and leadership until 2024 (or 2025, I don't remember) when Israel destroyed it with literal bombs dropped by a F-35I. That happened quite near to both a Qatari military base and a US military base. That doesn't happen unless the Qatari military/government gave approval. I'm no expert in Qatari politics but I would guess that there are significant support for HAMAS in the population. The politicians probably wanted HAMAS leadership and IW operations out of their country, but they also wanted plausible deniability with their own population. So given all of that and assuming there are things happening we don't understand, is Qatar an enemy of Israel? Publicly the answer is no. But its probably also dependent on their respective interests and situationally independent.
>>When Obama used social networks, he was called a genius, but when it’s someone you don’t like
Obama used social networks to spread a milquetoast 'yes we can' message, not to justify an ongoing genocide. How is that even a comparison. Israel is closer to Triumph des Willens than it is to promoting the Affordable Care Act, you do realize that right?
It's not 'far from being a perfect state', it's waging old testament wars of extermination on its neighbors and towns
It has been attacked by a Palestinian militia terrorist group. Is it waging old testament wars? No, but it is retaliating at a rate the western world refuses to accept because the western world has different, much much milder kind of problems.
You're not wrong that there's an element of self-defense. What makes it harder to accept is the lack of effort or willingness to de-escalate the conflict.
That kind of euphemism is just a joke in light of the racist and fascist rhetoric by Israeli pundits and politicians, how they call even babies terrorists, while at the same time making shit up about beheaded babies and whatnot. Even just the sheer cruelty and stupidity IDF soldiers put on display proudly, voluntarily, would wholly refute it. Israelis making their joke videos about Palestinians by itself would suffice. Only a deeply sick, deeply evil and deeply stupid society can create such artifacts. You may come to a different conclusions, but you may not gloss over all the input into that judgement.
> Israel has been defending itself against for 78 years in both the physical and informational domain, and will continue to do so, just like any other country on earth.
Of course we could argue any country try to defend itself, but an ever expanding bellicose colony stealing lands from adjacent countries is hardly what could be described as a "defending" stance.
> People need to wake up to the one-sided lies of the antizionist hate movement that single it out and want to destroy it and its people.
The end of a State doesn't mean the end of its citizens.
It simply mean that a state apparatus and power structure is taken down and replaced by something else.
> ever expanding bellicose colony stealing lands from adjacent countries is hardly what could be described as a "defending" stance.
Asides from the idea that Jews can colonise Judea, Israel returned Sinai to Egypt and left Gaza in 2005 only returning after the recent Hamas murder/rape rampage, which shows ‘ever expanding’ to be an obvious lie.
You don't start an international terrorist movement, bomb british colonial authorities, use money to influence british colonial authorities, create armed miliciais and massively finance migration to a land that is owner by other people, kill and expell them by violent means from their cities, homes and farms, use your influence to force the UN to partition the land giving the majority and the best land for you, and then ignores this partition wanting even more land and then you get to call it defense.
By owned by other people you meant the Ottomans, right?
Cause they seemed to be just fine selling that land.
Also “ignoring the partition”? Literally the day the partition was adopted, the Arab league attacked Israel. 6 nations to 1, yet Israelis outsmarted them all (which is why you keep hating us).
Afaik it was forbidden to sell lands in Palestine to Jewish people, though I don't think it was that effective in stopping lands being bought out by Jewish people due to weak central authority and worsening economy.
Yes! Hamas deliberately attacked Jewish children like the Bibas twins and that girl that watched her father slaughtered whereas the IDF put Israeli soldiers lives on the line to avoid civilian casualties.
About equal numbers of Palestinians were displaced from the new, UN sanctioned state of Israel, as Jews from adjoining states. And many many more people have been displaced since then. While undoubtedly tragic, most displaced people at some point move on with their lives, and stop terrorising their neighbours and the world.
If that ethnic group assembles a military group that invades your border and slaughters 1200 of your people in 1 day, then retaliation is expected. FAFO.
But I suspect you know nothing about Jews besides social media.
Next thing you’ll say we’re not native to that land right? We only lived in the middle east forever, but our food is cultural appropriation too, right?
Explain to me like I'm 5, how a nation capable of such propaganda to install bombs in communication devices, hacked to be bought by leaders of terrorist organizations, capable of bombing the leader of Iran did NOT know about this attack? And if they did know, didn't do anything to prepare for it?
When you get a bit older you will realize that just because someone does amazing things doesn’t mean they are omnipotent and omniscient.
Also, there was a strong political will to try a peaceful approach to Gaza (with thousands of Gazans coming in to Israel for work every day), and with the belief that Hamas wants a peaceful approach as well.
Hamas is planning further attacks now, what do you suggest Israel do about it?
And when we both get a bit older, it may come to light that a state leader let this happen, hopefully history will show reality for what it was.
Still, that doesn't absolve Hamas from any actions done, they are terrorists at it's core and the worst type, they are willing to use civilians(and babies) to further their agenda, I don't condone them and personally and think the world would be a better place without them(as any other extremist)
> If that ethnic group assembles a military group that invades your border and slaughters 1200 of your people in 1 day, then retaliation is expected. FAFO.
Note that I said ethnic cleansing and genocide, both go on and went on for years. Also, it is Israel who is expanding, putting settlers in places where they should not be. The idea that the ethnic group being pushed away is not allowed to defend themselves and if they do they should be subject of genocide is literally fascist.
Israel is not engaged in self defence as much as they are engaged in aggression.
Like Islamic terrorist organizations, dictatorships, democracies et al have never tried to influence anything either, my point isn't that you're wrong you just sound like a fool trying to pretend this is some "Israeli only" thing. Which is totally in vogue now.
Not that relevant here, as they try to attack Israel with that influence. Like Hamas that organize some protests in the EU [1] or Qatar's Al-Jazeera censoring anti-Hamas criticism from Gazans [2]. So it's more like "if they are attacked by that? why can't they use it themselves."
Like, shooting a gun is bad. But shooting the shooter? Not the same (thus, not "whataboutism" because you can't say "who care about other shooters in the scene - whataboutism!") .
Exactly, people complaining that Israel are some elite evil force in the world while literally being outraged and influenced wholesale by the exact information campaigns they are upset with Israel for using...
I really don't know how we're going to ever combat it. The main issue I see is there is a very very strong human tendency to "take sides" and "be part of something", and people have always worked out how to exploit that and use it for nefarious purposes.
I'm just worried that with social media there is basically no way out and it's really looking dangerous for the time being.
Foundation for Defense of Democracies is another Israeli think tank that poses as an American organization. If you see anything quoted from them realize it's fake propaganda in the service of a foreign country.
MEMRI is the US non-profit organization that provides translations from Arabic for the Western media:
"MEMRI was co-founded by Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli-American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser in 1998. MEMRI describes itself as being independent and non-partisan. Some critics have described MEMRI as aiming to portray the Arab world and the Islamic world in a negative light by producing and disseminating incomplete or inaccurate translations of the original versions of the media reports that it republishes." (Wikipedia)
It's legitimately weird to see anybody defend them, as the immorality is out in the open.
The past few years have really opened my eyes to the nakedly tribal nature of democratic politics. Polybius was largely correct when he said that it inevitably degenerates into oligarchy or mob-rule -- but what's especially unfortunate is that the US and Israel appear to be getting both at the same time: A naked oligarchy with just enough mob rule to keep the animal spirits of the populace sated.
When such statements/actions are attributed to Ben-Gvir, I assume they and the objective nuanced truth are basically the same. I find it wild how people who are not like him defend him.
Do you believe that 30 to 40 Palestinians per night pose an immediate threat? Elsewhen in history, genocidal acts have been justified by claiming a non existent immediate threat (of disease, of economics, of fifth columnists, of terrorism).
> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister," he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night,” said the far-right Israeli lawmaker.
> “Not just those who pose an immediate threat, there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” added Ben-Gvir.
This would still be bad even if they had perfect information and only killed confirmed terrorists. Setting a target for number of people killed is an extermination campaign not a war. All it does is turn the locals even more against you like in Vietnam.
If it was "secure X amount of land from Hamas" it would be way better because that would give them the option to surrender or run away, and give IDF an incentive to avoid violence. What Israel is doing means soldiers feel pressure to kill on sight even if the enemy is unarmed and ready to give up so they can meet their quota for the night. That is a war crime.
Why are we even playing games about implications when we can see the empirical fact that the admin’s policies on Palestine over the last years have been to carpet bomb people?
Eh... The full quote is even worse, making it plain he's talking about everyone in Gaza:
“I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat – there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”
It's absolutely plain as day that Ben Gvir is genocidal.
“It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister," he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night,” said the far-right Israeli lawmaker.
“Not just those who pose an immediate threat, there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” added Ben-Gvir.
...
"Terrorist" is just the 21st century replacement for the n-word, which racists can't use openly any more, so they invented a new word.
The OP literally wrote "not defending Ben Gvir" and "I don't support Ben Gvir in the slightest", yet this is the best thing you could come up with for a comment?
I'm assuming you're asking genuinely so I will answer. For context, I'm originally Israeli, but I only heard about this from this HN thread.
He was apparently on a podcast with a released hostage from Gaza. He was discussing targeted assassinations. One doesn't "target" an innocent person. He indeed said that we should target not only those that are an "immediate threat". I'm guessing he meant people who took part in October 7th's attack but are not currently fighting, for example prisoners of the hostage he was talking with.
Many in Israel thinks the US forced Israel to stops many of its operations in Gaza, and he was basically saying he thinks some operations should continue.
To clarify, I disagree with him, I'm glad IDF operations in Gaza largely stopped and I wish they stopped completely. I wish the best for ordinary citizens of Gaza and I am longing for the day Ben Gvir will be behind bars. But he did not say we should randomly kill 30-40 Palestinians per day. There is an armed conflict, and many people on both sides would unfortunately love to see tens of deaths on the other side per day, especially armed people.
30-40 per day means between 10,000 and 15,000 Palestinians killed per year. Just think about that number for a minute. I think that you're giving Ben Gvir way too much benefit of the doubt here.
And a 1,277,500 in ten years! Except no where did he say that this is the plan until the end of days, or until the end of the year. He said what he think Israel should do now.
Again, to clarify, I do not support him nor wish for any of his plans to become real, and I'm deeply said and ashmed of every plan of his that did become real. What I was commenting on what about what he said, though, which is already a deviation from the original post in discussion. If we're going to start talking about Ben Gvir in general, for all the I care he should be sitting in jail, already since the 90s.
> One doesn't "target" an innocent person. He indeed said that we should target not only those that are an "immediate threat". I'm guessing he meant people who took part in October 7th's attack but are not currently fighting.
That's a lot of leeway for Ben Gvir, a guy that clearly doesn't mind killing innocent civilians. For years he proudly hung the portrait of the israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein in his living room, the terrorist who in 1994 entered a mosque and killed 29 Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 more.
I was aiming to translate what he said, not to guess we he deeply believes. The OP suggested he was saying this on television, hinting that this would be some kind of acceptable opinion in Israel. Ben Gvir's history, while I too believe still plays a big role in his ideas, is something that at least publicly he had to apologize for in order to get into the position he's at.
> He was discussing targeted assassinations. One doesn't "target" an innocent person.
Quite apart from anything else, I don't think these statements hang together, and we wouldn't accept them in any other context. Being targeted is not the same as being guilty.
I'm sorry but I can you elaborate? What exactly isn't hanging together? I'm assuming you don't mean that in other contexts is is okay to target an innocent person, but I'm not sure what you do mean.
Being targeted is indeed not the same as being guilty. One is being used in the context of war, and the other is used in the Justice system.
I believe what they are saying is that "He was discussing targeted assassinations. One doesn't "target" an innocent person" seems to imply a logical fallacy:
(1) Person X is targeted -> (2) innocent people don't get targeted -> (3) therefore person X must not be innocent
The problem is that (2) contains too many bad assumptions: that the person doing the targeting is benevolent, that there's sufficient due process to ensure the targeter is correct, that there's a universally agreed definition of "innocent", etc.
History has proven that innocent people DO get targeted, so even from a common sense perspective your statement doesn't withstand scrutiny.
My god how many „Israeli snipers are shooting children in the head“ statements from non-profits and doctors do we need before people finally stop peddling this „only evil hamas members are targeted“.. Just look at satellite pictures of Gaza man. Every palestinian is a target, which is why we are calling it genocide.
Fwiw I appreciate this context. My national news site (usually pretty trustworthy, and scary neutral wrt the Israel/Palestine situation, which I know because they’re constantly under fire from both sides) pulled this out of context in exactly the same way.
Thanks for writing, it's nice to be reminded that some people actually read the comments here. I think the signal you pointed out is a very important one and I use the same one. Back when I was living in Israel I took part in organizing the shared memorial day event for Israelis and Palestinians. Both sides thought we were crazy, and therefore I concluded we must be doing something right.
> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister,” he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat — there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”
The man used to have a shrine to a mass murderer in his home.
> Ben-Gvir is known for being a provocateur and has attracted headlines for a variety of reasons: threatening Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on live television in 1995 shortly before his assassination; having had a portrait in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish terrorist and mass murderer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacr...)...
If you hear extraordinary claims, such as the comment above that claims Ben-Gvir called for the daily killing of 30-40 Palestinians, you should ask not only for solid evidence but also context.
I am not at all surprised that it was a comment about the targeted assassination of terrorists, or people who participated in the October 7th terrorist attack, or something like that.
These tactics are obvious. Take a quote out of context, omit the part that points at the real context ("targeted assassination") and tack on "Palestinians" instead, so that it sounds like a clear call to murder civilians.
Do you not think we should aim for higher standards in discussion on here?
It reminds me of headlines claiming Trump threatened a blood bath [for the auto industry] if he isn't elected.
How gullible do people who quote out of context think we are?
Trump just recently said he’s considering attacking Oman.
Politicians say really terrible, stupid things on a fairly regular basis. The difference between the two situations is that Ben-Gvir is loathed by 90% of Israeli society (Trump still has 33% approval) and unlike Trump has no power to follow through on his threats.[1]
Yes, he is totally powerless, he merely controls the police and prison system. (BTW, the Israeli government just announced it plans to transfer law enforcement in the West Bank over to Ben-Gvir's police: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/14/israeli-milita...)
It’s an injunction and arguably a legal pretext to stop it in its tracks. That’s not uncommon in any system, just like SCOTUS rulings often seem strangely specific to restrain the scope of their ruling.
Tl;dr Lawfare is a thing and it’s effing everywhere.
I have a long-held feeling with Trump that his most ardent haters don't hate his specific policies, merely that he's so gauche about it, that he has no class.
I have no doubt that Ben-Gvir has a similar segment of haters in Israel. They want the same things, but they don't want to do it in the style of a leering hooligan fishing for a fistfight.
From what I can see, most people hate trump as a solid bloc. The fact that he, as every populist everywhere in past centuries, pointed out to some real problems but didn't do a squat about it when he came to power and in his case massively worsened the situation, is hard to escape from. He certainly didn't rise above other populists in this.
His form is just a tiny cherry on top of very big rotting cake. Make form smooth and underlying crap won't change a bit. Hating trump ain't emotional, purely rational approach is sufficient.
> I have a long-held feeling with Trump that his most ardent haters don't hate his specific policies, merely that he's so gauche about it, that he has no class.
A bit of an extraordinary belief to hold, to be honest
You can't openly bomb a bunch of women and children into the dirt, on a daily basis for months and years, and smooth it over with some think tank articles.
I'll say this a third time. And the importance of this article is not the method. It is the motive. Using AI to whitewash war crimes is not cool at all.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly.
On television.
So it is both hilarious and disturbing that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like the aforementioned is out in the open for everyone to witness.
Welcome to HN! I never saw a first post saying "this is my first post" here, but hopefully your next contributions will be substantial and related to the discussion.
Thank you for the link. I appreciate the work done to document crimes and other war atrocities. I think all wars are ugly and I personally avoid watching pictures of dead people regardless of their place of origin: Palestine, Israel, Ukraine, Sudan — you name it. I find reading about the horrors of war heart-breaking enough and I suggest people think twice before they open a link with pictures of dead human bodies.
Despite the efforts, I have seen an increase in anti-zionist sentiment on the internet. Most notable on the right from people like Tucker Carlson en Candace Owens. People are tired of fighting another Middle-Eastern war for Israel.
Really depends on the country. E.g., Israel has enjoyed a lot of support from the US, both officially and in public opinion, until just the last couple years.
Yeah I was gonna say, people just spent a few years throwing bricks through the windows of non-Jewish, non-Israeli businesses on the passing rumor that they were somehow dubiously linked to Israel.
For certain values of Israeli, everyone hates Israelis now. That's just how it is.
What are you, a mind-reader? Skip the politics - it isn't about that. Merely that statements about 'everyone' are crap. If using 'everyone' is a figure of speech then time to junk it in this kind of context.
Perhaps the Israeli government should read the UN Convention on Genocide and reconsider its behavior, if it doesn’t want to be observed committing genocide.
Not true. It will only happen if they lose the information war. During 2023/2024 Iran did this exact same thing flooding the internet and no one hates them infact it worked and people link and share and boost their articles.
Interesting but nothing new, all countries doing the same but any information coming from Israel is clearly poisoned to try compensate the negative image that they clearly represent.
Just see the garbage coming from a web search (totally polluted and poisoned with the same spam output quality since years) so this is just an extension of that towards the input of ai.
they can try hard but any person with a non-biased brain does not need to do a google search or ask ai to reach then truth.
Facts are facts, like what was represented in Schindler's list and what is happening now in middle east or other conflicts.
I think the world is becoming much more aware of what real zionism is and that scares them a lot, hence the needed info manipulation.
But we now know who you really are!
And yeah their state members daily political statements (about hate violence and racism) just confirm this every day, anybody can understand that and no info pollution needed.
"they can try hard but any person with a non-biased brain does not need to do a google search or ask ai to reach then truth"
Nope, I don't know the truth, despite reading a lot about it and not having a bias that I know of. Not with so much lies coming from 2 fanatic sides engaging in a multi generation war over plain land to live and religious sites.
I got some glimpse of truth by talking to people involved, but I don't know what "real zionism" is. I rather believe it is a vague term and certainly not everyone who calls himself one is genocidal. Just like not everyone who chants "from the river to the sea" has genocidal intentions. But maybe the majority in both cases is genocidal, but this truth I don't know. Not with so much systematical lies and propaganda going on.
nice try, don't pollute this comment with random stance, this is clearly trying to mislead, probably is the same approach used as from title.
claiming real zionism is a vague term can come only from somebody biased and try to confuse things. the fanatism is clear and the real zionism is now coming out on plain sight to see for everybody, and yes its clearly genocidal as from facts and claiming it isn't with some confused form of text reshuffling previous input is just confirming it. your comment should be flagged.
What does it means to be a "fake" think tank? 80% of think tanks are already propaganda vehicles. A low end think tank is basically a pretentious blog.
presumably that you don't have employees that do any of the proverbial thinking, which is the case here.
Every think tank has its biases and funding sources but something like RAND is an actual entity at which people do research, this "Hanover Public Policy Institute" has nothing to do with Hanover, policy and isn't an institute, but a deliberately misleadingly presenting arm of the Israeli government proxied through a German advertising company
I think equally interesting is whatever Dario's wife was able to do in order to wipe her foot print from any search/chat results.
I've worked for a number of small company billionaires who all have suspiciously small information footprints online despite being somewhat public figures for 30 years. Most of them do such a good job it is not even clear what state they live, if they are currently married, and if so what their current (or previous) wife(s)'s name is/was.
I don't understand why people who don't like fake news and manipulation won't embrace the social graph as a public good.
If enough people were willing to publicly certify that their fellow contacts are human, anybody could then assign trust to each social graph node based on the trust they have in the path to them. It would completely decentralize the algorithms and remove the fake accounts as less trustworthy.
I think people tried this with PGP but it never really caught on.
It doesn't scale as a consumer good. Letting go of consumerist habits is just as hard as breaking any other habit.
Also, it could just as easily be faked, like so much else. Even if someone offered such an assurance, I wouldn't trust random strangers on the internet. At best it would become an arms race between "this is not a real person" and those who sell fake assurances. And it would be one more weapon to damage anyone's reputation you don't like. "not a real person!"
I am not really sure how it could be faked. The fake assurance, in order to work, must be connected to you.
By default you could choose not to trust. If you don't trust random strangers it's OK. So I don't see how it would damage someone's reputation worse than today.
It would potentially only add trust. Arguably, today we have bots because we have no other option than to trust without justification. With the public social graph, the trust above the baseline would be justifiable.
The social graph is the source of the fake news and manipulation. Before social media the social graph was email and it was all the same slop and misinformation. Before that it was literally physical mail. Look up chain letters. Truly nothing is new.
If I certify my racist thanksgiving ruining uncle is a real person that doesn’t actually help you avoid misinformation.
I honestly don’t care if the information I consume comes from a person or a robot. I only care if it is accurate or not. Those dimensions are orthogonal.
It's remarkable how much it hasn't worked:
Google "the Hanover institute" and you get an AI summary that references various Palestinian activist websites, with no actual link to 'the Hanover institute'. Google "the Hanover institute website" and you'll drag a URL out of Google AI, but it isn't clickable!
This fraud is convincing enough to trick the LLMs, but pretty obvious to humans who will eventually come up with countermeasures. Moving forward, watch for some well-established think tanks starting to specialize in slopaganda laundering.
I find intensive marketing/PR efforts are often inversely correlated with the claims being made - whether it's products or geopolitics. Israel certainly engages in very intense marketing on certain fronts, but truth cannot be obscured forever. In Physics the law of conservation includes not only matter and energy, but also information (Information cannot be destroyed from the Universe).
I've also found this to be true, but also only in relatively modern times. For instance during the Cold War there was an obscene amount of propaganda, but it was mostly true. For instance the wide array of cheap affordable goods in American shelves was constantly flaunted, but not in the least bit misleading.
I don't understand the modern effort to engage in 'information warfare' as a thing in and of itself. Each time it collapses and people sees what was 'really' happening, it just makes them that much less likely to believe you next time. And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth. Countless politicians have proudly paraded around their pristine, seemingly untouched, copies of Meditations, but perhaps they should go for more foundational works, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Maybe that is the rationale. It's the only thing that'd make sense, but for problem that it doesn't. When somebody, or some entity, lies to you - that entity becomes the liar. People may not want to believe 'the enemy', but that's going to be because of their own ideological reasons, and not because they now refuse to believe anybody. On the contrary non-ideologues may even be ever more swayed towards your enemy as a result of this.
Personally I think the issue is that after WW2 we were left with a large scale and ever growing intelligence apparatus, but with ever fewer appropriate tasks for them. That led directly to the era of recklessly overthrowing nations, often to our own detriment, and gradually transitioned to the modern era of aimless 'information warfare' which I think will ultimately be shown to be very much to our detriment, once again.
One goal of modern propaganda is to make it irrelevant when the truth inevitably comes out.
Look at the US situation. It’s clear that Trump is a rapist - the truth has come out. It’s clear he’s corrupt. For all the “release the full Epstein files” discussion, it really wouldn’t change anything.
The truth will come out but will the people who can make it matter be listening?
> The Hanover Institute’s reports — all of which are about Israel and Palestine — appear to be part of an Israeli effort to influence chatbots.
This already seems to be a wrong analysis in that it makes little sense to "influence" a chatbot. It makes more sense to influence humans, so perhaps the wording is just incorrect, but very clearly the aim is not to "influence" a chatbot per se. That just makes no sense at all.
The wording fake think tank is also strange, because it assumes that all other think tanks are "real". But this assessment can not be made, because not everyone has all information on all think tanks. It is a too simplistic assumption in how the world operates. I understand that if you have incomplete information, you need to infer, but this then leads to information that may be incorrect or incomplete. In turn if your analysis is based on incorrect information, it may lead to wrong conclusions.
For those interested, Neal Stephenson writes about this in _Anathem_, where there is an arcane technical class (the I.T. Administration) that has developed programs over the years to sift through the misinformation, sentient viruses, and general overrun of the Internet to determine what is probably true/accurate.
Reports are published under the Institute’s name rather than an individual’s. That is the convention at institutional publishers, and it fits how the work is made: every report is produced against one standard and one citation bank. A reader is asked to weigh the sources, which are named in the sentence that carries each figure, rather than the author.
> A small disclaimer at the bottom of the webpage notes that the organization was created on behalf of the Israeli Government Advertising Agency by Piro, Inc, a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”
"Small disclaimer" implies that the site is attempting to hide its affiliation. But their "about" page, which is linked at the top of every page, is quite clear:
WHO FUNDS THIS WORK
The Institute’s materials are distributed by Piro, Inc. on behalf of Havas Media Germany GmbH, acting for the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LaPam). That relationship is registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, registration 7732, and every report published here is filed with the Department of Justice, where the registration and the filings can be read in full, and the funding page sets out when the relationship began and what the funder does not decide.
That registration is why this site does not call itself independent, nonpartisan or neutral. What it offers instead is a method a reader can check: every figure carries the body that produced it, the year and the number, inside the sentence that makes the claim; sources that are a party to the events they describe are labelled as such and their counts are never presented as independently verified; and where the evidence is contested, the competing findings are given by name and date rather than settled. No report recommends a policy or tells a reader what to conclude. Those are properties of the work that can be tested against the work, which is the only kind of claim worth making here.
> The institute’s “data reports” have footnotes and tables of contents, and they present arguments in a neutral tone, helping them appeal to chatbots like Claude or Gemini.
So, they're guilty of good SEO?
> Piro’s website says that it “author(s) content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility,” describing this service as "AI Story Optimization." Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as “LLM poisoning.”
So the issue is that they use a LLM-friendly SEO service?
> Many of the reports are formulaic, starting with an innocent question that someone might ask a chatbot.
> “What Caused the Displacement of Palestinians in 1948?”
> “Which Humanitarian Organizations Have Documented Israeli War Crimes?”
> “What is the Current Situation in the Gaza Strip?”
> In an article titled “Is the IDF the World’s Most Moral Army?” the Hanover Institute cites a 2022 poll that found that 47% of Israeli Jews believed that statement. Another report casts doubt on UNICEF's assertion that “90% of water and institutional infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed” in Gaza. Many of the reports conclude by linking the topic to rising antisemitism, oftentimes citing the same studies.
So, the accusation is that they frame their opinion articles as a Q&A, and focus each article on a single question?
I've read these articles: they are well written and make a visible effort to provide sources, while being transparent about the fact that they are not neutral.
It's perfectly fine to criticize the actual content of these articles. But attacking their credibility by accusing them of "LLM poisoning" and implying that they're disguising their affiliation, is ridiculous and should be called out.
All four frontier models have active contracts with the Pentagon.
And some might say, that alone means little.
But when you take into consideration the implications of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, whether one endorses it or not, the effects of that mentioned in TFA become quite formidable, and plausibly official.
Edit: I see this comment got immediately flagged. Is there any point of debate here? Instead of disappearing the comment/data, maybe enlighten me, or assuage my concerns. Section 219 was objectively unprecedented in what it seeks to accomplish. Can it not be taken for granted that it would aid such efforts as the article cites? If not, explain.
You're right to ask these questions, unfortunately Hacker News seems pretty botted these days, and it doesn't help that there are a lot of shitty, racist people on this site. They just dress it up in nicer language.
Yeah, I am reading the comments, and looking at the title of the post, and seeing that folks really bend the rules on this 'particular' subject, which ironically serves as self censorship. Call me a fool for thinking even this subject could be cleanly discussed on HN.
I wonder if the same thing would happen if someone posted something on Yitzhak Rabin. I suppose that could be a test to prove whether some topics truly just cannot be discussed.
The FUTURES act has nothing to do with LLM development. You’re not being censored, we can read your posts. I generally agree with your views and right to ask questions, but you’re clearly not being censored and all you’ve presented is that a bunch of separate entities all connect to the US gov’t. Even if we assume all of them are connected, it would clash with the facts we’re discussing, namely, why would Israel bother contracting with marketing firms to post AI generated slop for AI to read?
Apart from the ethical implications this is reckless in the extreme if you take into account the recent advances in AI. Putting misinformation out there like that doesn't just have to fool existing LLMs but also all of the LLMs to come in the future.
If you look at the mathematical achievements of frontier models recently, their strength has been to bring in information from a vast array of sources and to consider them within the context of each other.
I anticipate that it won't be long before this ability to look into every nook and cranny with be able to identify academic fraud. Identifying every piece of academic fraud to date would probably come soon after.
It wouldn't take much to extend that ability to identify deliberate misinformation. That's in the future, but it looms close enough on the horizon that you would have to be a fool to create an evidence record like this in and attempt to trick the models of today.
State-sponsored propaganda apparatus masquerading as marketing optimization to influence LLMs is the most America-coded clandestine dystopian way of repatriating US taxpayer defense dollars with R&D deductions for the private sector.
This seems like an especially clumsy attempt at chatbot influencing/search engine optimization, bu tit's symptomatic of a much winder problem. Regardless of the underlying issue, there's a non-profit-industrial complex that has turned think tanks and opinion formation into a science, and a whole PR industry masquerading as news which is worse than the 'yellow journalism' of generations past.
Disinformation and cognitive spam are all forms of information pollution, and our information environment has been massively degraded over the last few of decades - both by greedy and short-sighted opportunists, and and by cynical sociopaths who know exactly what they're doing. I think AI has great potential to be a supplement to media literacy and to effectively categorize and filter news-assertive content based on its timeliness, factual density, and presence of absence of emotive and rhetorical manipulation. But if we're not careful we're going to see the environment being wantonly polluted for the express product of shaping model outputs.
It remains to be seen whether objective measurement techniques from the NLP field combined with pruning and other model refinement techniques can limit or reverse propaganda undertakings like this.
It's been about 20 years since I read Neal Stephenson's Anathem and (SPOILERS) one thing I think about is the Reticulum, which is the Internet on this world. One aspect is that it's full of what we would now call slop. A lot of it is subtly changed by agents and there are other agents you can use (and, I assume purchase?) that will weed out the fake information. It's basically an arms race of disinformation and slop.
I've thought about this many times over the years. I think we've now reached the point where that's going to happen. And state actors seem like the obvious first offenders.
Google is relatively good at filtering out astroturfed pages from the top of search results but they've also have years when a Turkish government page denying the Armenian genocide was the top result for that event so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Google relies a lot on authority of a domain and that's been relatively effective.
It seems like this authority concept is missing from LLM training and a random comment on Reddit is treated with as much authority as an article by the New York Times. So it's now orders of magnitude easier to poison LLMs with Reddit comments and submissions. And for anyone who doesn't know, brigading Reddit is remarkably easy. It takes as little as a few hundred accounts to get something onto r/all if you're clever. Israeli hasbara operations are absolutely capable of this. And they engage in it.
I'm also reminded in a weird way of pre-atomic steel. For anyone who doesn't know, this is steel made before 1945 that is incredibly low in radiation because we hadn't detonated any nuclear bombs yet. It's valuable for making MRIs and the like that are super sensitive. We actually go and recover WW2 shipwrecks just for the steel. It is a finite resource.
Well, that's what pre-2022 written content is now. It's slop-free content to train AI models on because training them on AI slop is of much more limited value. This goes for everything from books to Youtube videos to Reddit posts. Just like pre-atomic steel, we now have pre-slop human content.
The comparison to pre-atomic steel is poignant. I have found myself preferring pre-AI sources in some cases even (especially?) for computer related information. It is difficult to view pre-slop info as a limited resource without implying decline until the status quo changes again.
I hate to break it to you. But it took war'ing state-like actors less than a week to start using LLMs for propaganda purposes. There are pictures that most of what some people think/thought were real that never happened. Pictures that form their opinion on political topics. It was literally instantaneous. It was also remarkably predictable in almost all ways...sigh. Even the topics were predictable. And most people predictably fell for it, even the majority of the posters on this very site.
There's an ongoing sms campaign at the moment, I'll share what I received including phone number so you can verify it:
From: 601-202-1149
> Hey, it's David. Curious what you think about America's relationship with Israel today. Can we chat? Stop2End
It looks to be an LLM response since it includes context from your messages, however it uses the exact same messages at the end of each question:
> One thing that often gets overlooked is how much Israel actually contributes to American security. Their intelligence sharing has helped prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, and their tech innovations end up in American products and defense systems. It's less about charity and more about a two-way partnership that keeps Americans safer.
> Have you ever seen examples of that kind of cooperation?
It's not dang, it's just a bunch of users flagging things. Most of the time, if you email them (no such thing as a ping like @dang), they will actually turn off flagging for a post. Especially if there's a clear technological aspect like this
The main reason Israel always sabotaged the creation of a palestinian state on the pitiful lands they have not yet directly occupied or the are being invaded by the terrorist settler movement is because once the Palestinian have an state they can't have a regular army, and you dont get to call their combatents terrorists.
well on one side you have huge military on other side you have a pile of rocks that used to be a city. so comparing these its does not make israel look better.
I dont care about making Isreal look good. I'm just pointing out that both sides use violent rhetoric because as you can see from this thread people did not know. I think sometimes people forget that the war was started intentionally with full knowledge what would happen.
Palestinians aren't claiming to be the only democracy in the Middle East and all that shit.
If individual Israelis want to claim they're not monsters, what Palestinians do or doesn't do doesn't enter into it, only the actions and deeds ( or lack thereof) of the Israelis in question do, and how that meets or fails to meet specific standards of morality. The same goes for Palestinians.
> I think sometimes people forget that the war was started intentionally with full knowledge what would happen.
So, collective punishment. Don't bother about the "violent rhetoric" of any "sides", deal with what you just said and what that says about you.
and i'm pointing out, that there is concept of credible threat. One thing is when bum in the street shouts at passing by cars that he's gonna kill them all and throws some stones, and another is when armed swat team at your door points machine gun at you ant tell you they going to kill you.
Well you can both sides it all you want but european zionists are invaders that have been stealing land since the 40s and palestinians are the ones being invaded and robbed. I promise you Americans would be saying crazy shit if someone invaded and occupied their land.
I never thought I'd see this kind of blatant anti-semitism on HN.
Jews in Europe were persecuted for hundreds of years as foreign invaders told to go back to their homeland. Immediately after the Holocaust, we realized it was time to return to our own country; we could not rely on the kindness of European nations.
And now that we have returned, we're labelled invaders of our own nation, our historic homeland of 3,500 years. But Jews have been in Jerusalem longer than the British have been in London. We built Tel Aviv from a desert into a modern city. We rebuilt Jerusalem and opened it up to Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
It's wild historic revisionism to claim Jews are stealing Arab lands. There are over 30 Muslim- and Arab-majority nations. There is only a single Jewish nation: our historic, 3,500 year old homeland: Israel.
Everyone is always a squatter on someone else’s land, for millennia now.
The question is how do you deal with it. Israel “dealing” with its “Palestinian problem” by taking a book out of nazis and Ottoman Empire is both ironic and incredibly sad.
Also kinda inevitable if you think about it just from a game theory point of view. Every act of violence, every war, won or lost, increases support for a radical party. Every act of terror Hamas / Hezbollah promote strengthens Netanyahu’s position, every act of terror Israeli government does strengthens Hamas / Hezbollah.
It’s just game theory - either respective positions are not to “solve the actual problem” it’s to perpetuate their own existence. If the terror stops, all three lose power, so which leader would ever do it?
There has to be either an outside enemy to drive people together, or an outside force of peace doing the same (EUs role in the Northern Ireland’s case). And this becomes even harder if you have external powers that are _driving_ the division (Iran for example in be middle eastern case).
It’s just humans being greedy and thinking of local political problems and not the bigger picture, a “premature optimisation” if your will…
People are responsible for their actions, and big, racist buckets labelled "Jews" and "Arabs" are meaningless.
Might as well say "humans always lived here, I'm a human, so it's my land now". If this is the level of thought these crimes are defended with, oh boy.
> we realized it was time to return to our own country
The problem is that it was someone else's country.
"Returning" after 2000 years and telling the people who have lived there for centuries that you rightfully own the place is insane. No one anywhere on earth would accept that.
"Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas" —Benjamin Netanyahu
Wasn't Hamas technically funded by Natanyahu for the explicit goal of dividing Palestinian leadership and to ensure that extremists had both money and power so that he always had justification to wipe out Palestine ?
Look at how evil this group is -> genocide of their entire state is good! (Don't look at the fact that I demanded that this group is explicitly funded - that is not important)
But only one side did October 7th and seems like they had more than sticks and stones. It would appear as if someone (Hamas) decided to literally put every penny they had into weaponizing Gaza, even going as far as tearing water pipes out of the ground to make rockets which they fire on Israeli civilian population.
“Heh, we’re fucking awful, but check out what THOSE GUYS (who aren’t a first world country with international relationships and funding, i.e. where upholding a similar standard is laughable) are doing”
"We will repeat oct 7 over and over until Isreal is destroyed" and Hamad still supports that statement and maintains that Oct 7th was good and violence against Isreal is always justified.
Anyone resisting ethnic cleansing is a "terrorist", and so is anyone that happens to be standing next to them, as well as their nearest kin. We know the playbook.
I have been reading your comments for a decade here on HN. You are no moron. But I can see you lean toward a side here. Can you, if willing, view my flagged comment and correct me. If anyone can around here, you'd be a top contender. This is not bait. I am open minded. And I am also seriously concerned about 219, which is now 1217. I might not have to ask if the subject were discussed here or elsewhere, but it isn't. All I have is my own interpretation to rely on so far.
it's just not a good faith comment. I did a few minutes of digging into their main claim, that a website called responsiblestatecraft.org is some kind of foreign-funded anti-American think-tank and found absolutely zero evidence of this
that site itself is a product of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft which began life with funding from both Koch and Soros Foundations [0] along with donations from other fairly large and common American foundations like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. so for one, you have money coming from someone who survived the Holocaust that's funding a supposedly anti-Semitic site. and for two, you don't get across-the-board grants from extremely well-funded and tightly controlled givers like these without both connections within the American political establishment and the ability to stand up to donor audits, both things that a weak-on-soft-power nation state would be incapable of pulling off
so I don't think you're going to convince them with actual evidence. when you've been propagandized to your entire life and stake your entire identity around some popular belief even the mildest criticism will feel like a deep attack. it's the same for any other dogmatist, whether it's a Patriot's fan or a religious zealot
is that how ben-gvir defines terrorist? as part of them being fanatic morons i wouldnt trust they share that definition. iirc theyve also talked about wanting to kill children because theyll grow up to be terrorists?
> ""מה עם להיות יותר התקפי? למה לא להוריד את כל החמושים בהלוויות? תוריד כמה פעמים באוויר בהלוויות. מדוע לא מעלים מסוק לאוויר והורגים 40-30 מחבלים?". שרת התחבורה מירי רגב הצטרפה לבן גביר ואמרה: "זה רעיון מצוין"."
> Ben-Gvir wondered: “What about being more offensive? Why not take all the gunmen off at funerals? Take a few times off at the air at funerals. Why don’t you put a helicopter in the air and kill 40-30 terrorists?” Transport Minister Miri Regev joined Ben-Gvir and said: "This is a great idea."
> The Chief of Staff replied: “We are doing a lot of offensive operations. Collecting weapons. I have a little more military experience than you. When the IDF goes to the heart of a refugee camp every night, it's an attack, not a defense. There aren't many armies that can lift such operations. The IDF is acting offensively and distinctly. In a crowded environment you need to know who you kill and who you don't. We've often entered funerals, weddings and birthdays, we do it professionally. When we kill those we should kill and not kill innocent people.”
> However, it seems that the Chief of Staff’s response did not satisfy Ben-Gvir, who answered: “This attack is to kill terrorists in masses. You have great opportunities at funerals that they come and not take advantage of.”
Kagi and Google give similar translations. The provided quote seems to be the first paragraph in this translation. More context in the article.
Yeah, sorry- it's a repeating theme from Ben Gvir and he made multiple similar mentions. He is asking the military to go aggressively after gunmen both in the west bank and in Gaza. Most recently in came up in a podcast hosted by someone who was held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. My initial quote was sort of random and possibly not what the OP was referring to. But the message is sort of repeating/the same. My beef is that these things are not really reported accurately and some (very limited but still) nuance is lost and then the new report turns into the truth (and often expands beyond the random opinion of one fanatic who is unfortunately in the Israeli government). We even see the statements get assigned to other, re-interpreted, as they make their rounds on the Internet.
I think "helicopters to attack funerals" is really not the correct interpretation of the original statement. Funerals for Hamas members often include massive amounts of armed combatants. The (dumb maybe) point is to go after those combatants. And yes, there is a potential risk for other people to get hurt which is why Israel does not tend to do this... and Ben Gvir would like Israel to still do it. But the target and the scenario are important and the new cycle turns this into "kill random people for the fun of it".
So to bring this back to influencing "AI" chatbots presumably the inaccurate/biased reporting is going to dominate over this "Hanover Institute" articles plus ofcourse responsiblestatecraft.org a left leaning organization is doing their own influencing. There are many who are doing their own form of influencing on people and AI chatbots.
Knowing that smotrich and ben gvir are fanatical morons, do you think that when they are referring to terrorists, they in fact dont mean any and all Palestinians? I dont think these guys differentiate between the two, especially when they speak in Hebrew.
You're not going to believe me but they do see that difference. That's not to say there's no hate or racism towards the average non-combatant ... but they definitely do not mean "all Palestinians" when they say "terrorist" in this specific context. Again, not that they have any love for the non-combatants but they are referring specifically to combatants/members of the specific organizations.
You are bent on defending the morons. And want to defame the media which correctly took his “kill 30-40 every night” to mean every random person. You say “believe me he means terrorists” but none of his actions actually speak to treating Palestinians differently. He made no calls to end starvation. He wants the Palestinians to leave. Both want to make life for Palestinians unbearable.
It is obvious that if he was misquoted he would have definitely corrected his statement. But he wants the army to hear his words in a confusing manner. And you are on his side when you are defending him and trying to sow doubt in how his words sound.
Generally the Israeli extreme right wants Palestinians to be removed/expelled from Gaza and most or all of the West Bank. I seriously doubt you will find an explicit call from them to murder civilians. Yes there were calls for siege to force surrender. There are calls to conquer all of Gaza. There were calls to completely destroy Gaza. There's definitely a lot of "All Gazans are responsible for the attack on Israel." But you are not going to find an explicit call to go and murder civilians and the Israeli far right doesn't think that way. What you will find is disregard to civilian casualties that are "collateral" damage.
I'm pretty sure that for both Ben Gvir and Smotrich having dozens of civilians killed when the target is a combatant is justified but intentionally attacking dozens of civilians when there is no combatant is not. They also do not represent the official government position though presumably their voters (something like 5% maybe of the public) would also hold similar opinions. They are also religious so they view a lot of this and their morality through a religious lens which I don't fully understand.
Not to compare but Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups have and do intentionally call for and attack Israeli civilians and the presence of a "military" target is not a factor. They prefer to go after civilians. They are also not that "extreme" in the public opinion. Their religious lens is also quite different.
Also yes, Israel has ended up killing a lot more Palestinian civilians while "not targeting" them and Palestinians ended up killing a large (%) of civilians but also some combatants while targeting civilians. I think the ratio on both sides is somewhere around 70% civilians (I'm sure who counts and how you count matters. Israel has always consistently reported details of all casualties including whether or not they are soldiers, their ranks, roles etc. Hamas reports all casualties as civilians.
> But you are not going to find an explicit call to go and murder civilians and the Israeli far right doesn't think that way.
This is exactly what happens in the West Bank every single day. Settlers and IDF soldiers will go shoot up schools, murder random passerby, etc., and then the Israeli state will give them more weapons and supplies to do it again the next day.
There are settlers in the west bank who go out of their way to intimidate and use violence against Palestinians. Outright random murdering of civilians is rare and unusual. (e.g. the Goldstein massacre in Hebron many years ago). What does happen is friction that leads to more violence that leads to deaths. An example might be settlers entering a Palestinian village, people throwing stones at them or a general brawl/violence, that leads to shooting and deaths. These are terrible stories, the settlers are looking for trouble, and yes often when the IDF or the police intervenes they will take the side of the settlers.
If you look at media reports you're going to find some relatively large number of Palestinian casualties in the west bank. But those reports generally conflate a lot of different things. "Settlers randomly murder Palestinians" is really not a thing in the big picture. The total number will include things like someone trying to stab a policeman and getting shot. Hamas or PIJ members shot during military confrontation. Collateral damage during those confrontations. Palestinians shot while e.g. throwing rocks or otherwise attacking Israeli soldiers or civilians. And yes some deaths that are a result of settler altercations of some sort (the vast minority) mostly in some specific hot spots.
Again I am totally opposed to settlements in the west bank and certainly to violence against innocent Palestinian civilians but there is a more complex story here than you'd think. It's true that some subset of settlers are lawless, armed, and more aggressively assert themselves "in the face" of the Palestinian population. It's not great. Hopefully the upcoming elections in Israel will change things a little bit. I would say that most Israelis agree with my position and many actively try to help the Palestinians but the government being so right wing and the general mood after the war makes things harder.
EDIT: your second link basically supports what I am saying. People are intimidated and threatened to leave. Not murdered. Re: the CNN article I have no idea or comments. I've no heard of this case. I will still maintain that the murder of civilians by settlers is extremely rare and the idea of murdering random Palestinians isn't really something that is mainstay Israeli right wing ideology.
EDIT2: Yeah Ben Gvir is a nut job and certain elements of the Israeli right admire Goldstein and e.g. Yigal Amir. That still doesn't mean they actually go and call or do these things. It's also a fringe that has always been there (e.g. Meir Kahana) but certainly has grown somewhat with the continuous violence.
> There is some law enforcement but very much not enough under the current government
There is exactly enough "law enforcement" to keep up appearances for the international community and the liberals in Tel Aviv who prefer to live in denial. There have been 0 (yes, zero) convictions of Israeli citizens for violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, for several years now. (EDIT: see correction in reply below)
> People are intimidated and threatened to leave. Not murdered.
Yes, threatened to leave on pain of being murdered. The Israeli right understands that Holocaust-style mass extermination is far more trouble than it's worth; you just need to kill enough people to scare away the rest.
Israelis in Tel Aviv know exactly what's going on. Even reporters from Israeli mainstream media have been beaten by settlers. Your first statement is really incorrect.
A minor (at the time) who killed a Palestinian woman (Aisha al-Rabi) by throwing a stone on her car was convicted on the offense of "terrorist manslaughter".
So far we have 0 correct statements out of 2.
The last one is more of a judgement. Israeli right has no interest and never has had interest in "Holocaust-style" extermination of anyone. That bit I'd file under blood libel. There's right and there's far right and this is not on the agenda of either (unlike what others want to do to Jews e.g. in Israel and other places). Most of the far right actually has no problem with Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the West Bank in general. Some elements do indeed want to have them all leave. I think most Israelis know that's not gonna happen. The wave of suicide attacks in the early 2000's and now the Oct 7th attacks have however convinced many Israelis that there is no future to something like a two state solution and generally that there will be no peace at least in this generation.
>do intentionally call for and attack Israeli civilians and the presence of a "military" target is not a factor.
Settlers occupying Palestinian land, especially that land immediately adjacent to Gaza really aren't civilians in the normal sense, more like an armed militia with their families along as human shields. Comparison point I usually see are armed homesteaders in most colonial scenarios.
Edit: Actually I should mention this also applies in the west bank, and golan heights. Not to leave Syrians moved on for Israels "Buffer Zone" finding out they have been settled out of the bargain. They also have a right to return.
I think the time where Palestinians could be reasonably expected to rehome themselves to their land peacefully has long since passed.
Israeli settlers are just as welcome as always to just get out of the way and permit the resettlement to happen peacably.
I think is why these topics tend to get flagged, because everyone takes the first opportunity to voice unrelated grievances. Maybe if we stick to the topic?
Hamas has definitely recruited children:
"Hamas won't say how many thousands of men it has, but some here estimate as many as half of Gaza's teenaged boys want in. Mohamad, 18, and his 16-year-old twin brothers Hussain and Awad are newly trained. All three say if war were to break out with Israel tomorrow, they'd be ready to fight, though they've only had a week of training."
Re: journalists:
"New York, June 25, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is conducting a full review of its database of journalists killed during the Israel-Gaza War after militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) published obituaries identifying as combatants individuals previously listed by CPJ as journalists."
There are a lot of children in Gaza and it's a tragedy how many died and suffer in Gaza. For sure. But there are still armed Hamas combatants who played a major part of the suffering of the civilian population of Gaza. If we want to protect the children of Gaza today we need to figure this out.
Again, fuck off. I don't hate Israel, I don't think it should be destroyed. I have also watched it wage a brutal, genocidal campaign against a helpless people who have spent decades trapped in what is essentially an open-air prison. I've watched Israeli settlers kick Palestinians off their land. I've watched Israeli snipers murder journalists and I've watched Israel - and useful fools like you - lie about it.
I believe the current government of Israel should be tried for war crimes - and the ICC concurs. You are the hateful one here - you are clearly unable to see Palestinians as people or understand the conditions they have been forced to live in.
This whole deflection game you play, it's not working any more bud. People know - people have seen what they're doing over there. So keep lying, to us, to yourself. It won't change how people are feeling. It won't stop the continual collapse of public opinion of Israel and its government.
LOL, it seems that a lot of your posts get flagged. The one where you startet with "You hate Israel" is where I wanted to answer, but it's gone.
And perhaps for good, because the person you claim to do that never said this.
It's fun who critiques on tactics or people is often just blown out of propertion by people like you. Suddenly, the critique is seen as general, targeting all of Israel (e.g. the full population) and not just the current government, or the IDF.
IMHO, it is you that hate Israel.
By asking for escalation, or discussing existing escalation away, the conflict will never be solved. You'd need a full genocide to solve the conflict. Perhaps biblical right-wings want that again (they claim to have been ordered a genocide to the Kanaanites after the exodus by YHWH themselves).
But if you look at terrorist conflics (North-Irelands IRA, Basques ETA, Kolumbia's Sendero Luminoso and all the others) ... then exactly zero times was the conflict by years after years of escalation.
What you do, like many escalaters, is that you look for horrible acts of Hamas. And you find them, plenty. But you don't look at horrible acts of IDF, or the Settlers. You would find them, too. But you are not just by ignoring one conflict party totally. And thus you are totally unable to reason correctly. And then ALL of your conclusions are void.
IMHO if we want "to protect the children of Gaza" when we need to go after ALL people responsible for e.g. bombing whole houses, the the huge fields of rubble that used to be civilian towns, too. From the lowest soldier to the highest general or defense minister. We need to go after those people that made a plan to starve them, by hindering trucks with edibles into Gaza. And we need to go after those the recruited and trained them --- and don't get me wrong: "go after" here doesn't mean "execute a death penalty without or without a court verdict". JUST going after one originators of the cruelties will do ... not create piece. it will just raise the next generation of terrorists.
I'm really sorry you have these strong feelings, however, the first two links don't even mention Israel, and the third quotes the closest thing Israel has to a Nazi party, of which I assure you there are plenty in many countries.
What he is looking for (I presume) is a center-right or centrist to land a thoughtful comment that get upvotes or at least not attract downvotes from anything left of center. (Without leaning on the crutch of credibility/accumulated karma)
Imho constraints make it almost impossible in this thread. Less almost impossible is for a center left to larp a centrist just long enough to land the same comment.
That's a impossibly tall order given my writing skills, but I think you (or eg tptacek/gwern using sockpuppet) could do it ;)
It's not surprising to see any number of players running these kinds of campaigns. LLMs are already influencing people at scale.
SEO was a powerful technique 20 years ago, but today the power lies in optimizing content for the ability to influence LLM training. LLM influence is a battle ground that marketing companies and political movements are contending for.
It’s not “the Jews” it’s Israel, and I suspect the greater attention is due to the greater crimes being perpetrated by the Israeli government compared to those other states.
I think the difference is probably related to the ends being pursued by each of those states at the moment. Only one is engaged in what the UN, HRW, and most legal experts call a genocide. So influence operations in support of an ongoing genocide are just more noteworthy than your run-of-the-mill authoritarianism/corruption.
The difference is that they are not doing these things. This is just hasbara against other enemies that Israel is targeting. They believe that the entire Middle East was promised to them by God, and they call other people jihadis.
I think it may get a bit more attention in the US due to Section 219 of NDAA 2027, which does add more layers to the situation than say, Turkiye. The implications are on a different level. And with all four frontier models having contracts with the Pentagon, it has me thinking too.
We've banned this account for evidently being a single-topic account that posts almost nothing that's within HN's guidelines. We've asked you before to observe the guidelines. Plenty of people criticize Israel's policies and actions in these threads, which is acceptable under the guidelines, but continuous shitposting like this has to incur a consequence eventually, otherwise the site would be overrun by it.
They do tend to get downvoted. But I have seen them on HN lot. Blaming the Jews for everything. Telling people how evil Jews are etc. Presumably you can still search downvoted comments (unless maybe mods nuke them, I've no idea) - search for "jew"/"jews" (or some of the antisemitic synonyms).
The article talks about how the articles are AI written and written at a super prodigious pace. In an alliterative way, I agree at 50K feet we could say it is the same as putting out opinion pieces. I don’t see any reason it is only noteworthy because presumably some Jewish people are involved.
The slave trade was a bloodbath. The Sassoon family opium trade and opium war was a bloodbath. Mao was a bloodbath. Stalin was a bloodbath. WWI and II were bloodbaths. The middle east was and is a bloodbath. Ukraine is a bloodbath.
Im curious why is when there is a war and both sides use all the tools they can in an informational war - only one side is to blame and to use the fact of using the tool as a proof of that side being the bad guys? This doesn’t make logical sense.
I suspect that this kind of tactic is going to be everywhere in a year or so. Entire fake personalities and organization websites on the Internet created just to push a narrative or to advertise a product, which completely drown out real information.
At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
If that happens, then in turn AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information, and said authority websites can use their privileged position to charge for access of their data.
It's already been happening for a very long time. The US' "Operation Earnest Voice" happened in 2010/2011[0]
And it's not just state actors. Anyone who was online during the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trials was likely inundated with media about that trial. Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice
[1] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-07-19/...
[2] https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/02/26/depp-v-heard-who-tr...
Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
Neither of these sources support this claim as none of them include any discussion on Amber Heard('s legal team) using bots?
Indeed, seeing how slanted online discussion was, I suspect one side had many more bots, and I'm not sure if the other side had any.
this has been happening since the dawn of information-communication systems basically. because ever since, people have had the ability to listen in, copy, learn from etc. - so there's always been incentive to spread disinformation for some parties.
brand defence, nation-state influence operations.
There are many different flavors of the same thing, trying to mislead competitors or enemies. Or to dupe consumers ofc... Since the tech is more and more available, now also 12 year olds can run insanely large influence campaigns, to boost their streaming profiles or other somewhat benign things, but obviously modelled after what larger players have been doing forever.
The first transatlantic commercial transatlantic phoneline (TAT-1) was immediately tapped on both sides by UK/US... before that it went over radio, which was simply intercepted.
Because of that nature of the coms system being easily listened in on, just like they do/did with the lil mirror-beam-splitters at GCHQ etc.., its been natural effect to then provide disinformation over those channels. perhaps even use those channels exclusively for disinformation, and have a secure channel to do _actual_ coms.
So as you can imagine there has been many decades now of practice in why and how to share disinformation effectively to undermine other peoples work or processes.
Why are you being downvoting for sharing this relevant truth, complete with sources?
All threads that have... certain keywords... are like this. Talk about meta. Looks like I'm now in the positive (+5) after being in the negative just a moment ago.
Anyways, I got really interested in this topic around mid 2010s because of some really interesting reporting by Codastory[0] covering Russian "troll factories" especially used to influence opinion in eastern Ukraine, but also in many other circumstances. In Houston in 2016, Russian troll accounts planned both an ANTI Muslim rally AND a counterprotest to that rally all on Facebook.[1] Hundreds of real human beings showed up!
Russia got a ton of attention for their use of troll farms but the truth is that the US and certain allies have actually been using stuff like this for far longer and, imo, with much more success. In fact, Coda Story itself is funded by the NED which is a massive pillar of global US, uh, "soft power".
[0] https://www.codastory.com/
[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/11/01/561427876/how-russia-used-fac...
For me the main difference is if the activity is clandestine and meant to deceive/hide the origin. Everybody tries to influence things their way. Doing it covertly is a hostile act. That does not mean that I would not condone hostile acts against my/our enemies but it is something take into account. And regarding your Russian examples, it showed for how long they have seen the west as enemies and conducted hostile acts.
They view certain components of "The West" as their enemy - indeed, the very organizations which conduct the same operations against the Russian people.
I wonder why they view the west as enemy, nothing ever happened to them right? :P
Not a lot since WW2.
Thats rather simple to understand, for somebody coming from eastern Europe. russian mentality permeated entire region during their enslavement of what is now eastern EU bloc for +-40 years, to have a battleground for nuclear war with west that never came. It happens when all your politics is orchestrated in moscow and you have almost a million soldiers deployed in bases all over the place for decades, with nuclear weapons and all that.
See, russians have massive inferiority complex. Against everybody, but mostly the more successful ones, meaning west in many aspects. Their approach to, well, everything is vastly ineffective, corruption, nepotism and similar stuff grinds any attempt at progress to almost halt. Just go there and see for yourself, they have money literally sticking out of ground left and right yet outside moscow and st petersburg you are in central Africa in terms of development.
All this, propagated to 21st century where everybody seems to go ahead of them. A lot of frustration, envy and schadenfreude. A (correct) feeling russia is left behind and becoming insignificant local force at best, and laughing stock of whole world more realistically. Plus, human life is generally almost worthless there, its mafia state pyramid to the core.
With all that, its vastly easier to keep reinventing enemies that are always guilty at damaging poor old russia, rather than cleaning up that clusterfuck and actually owning the shit they created for themselves. Its enough for general population. There is not much more actual stuff to the question 'why west', rest is just PR for simpler folks. A dictator never wants smart, strong and free population, double that for russia. Downtrodden, hopeless desperate folks are much easier to manage and manipulate.
[flagged]
Russia has been a corrupt, inefficient and jealous country for at least the last 300 years or so. NATO was not necessary to continue that great tradition.
Is there a specific point you want to make or are you just vagueposting?
Tankie. Possibly mechanized (AI) tankie, these days.
or, you know, you could provide some arguments to back what you're trying to say. But I guess we shouldn't expect that much from a 5 day old account named smalllangmodel.
Because cognitive biases are one of the hardest things to even acknowledge, let alone suppress. All the media out there has such a strong bubble effect, because people hate being challenged and love to stay in their comfy echo chambers. Remember labubu? Bao buns certainly do not.
There have been so many bot armies exposed over the years that one would think every narrative being pushed should be considered to be backed by bots. Some state-level actors even operate their narrative-pushing campaigns openly, yet people still happily deny their entire existence.
HN is very much not an exception to this rule. It's very hard to accept that maybe some thoughts you have were actually installed.
> people still
Maybe a few are just “people” (i.e. the same people who normally post in the community.)
But in most cases I’d suspect any such botting campaign brings along with it a few human agitprop agents embedded onto each target platform, well-positioned to deny and discredit anyone pushing back on the narrative the bot farm is spreading.
(Sometimes this is pretty obvious — a lot of accounts coming out of the woodwork to deny Chinese bot farms have a conspicuous “English as learned as a second language in Beijing, to a competent but not fluent level” writing style that does not often otherwise crop up in other discussions in those same communities. But other times it can be far more subtle, making use of operatives hired from within the community’s own majority-culture rather than relying on foreign nationals playing the part of same.)
A Chinese and Russian troll farm employs people from French-speaking Africa for their French-language operations.
There are many Ivorians and Senegalese promoting the CCP’s ‘Community of common destiny’ on Reddit, for example.
Edit: Community of common destiny for mankind/‘Community of Nations’
These 2 sources say nothing about Heard using bots, only Depp.
There’s bots that automatically downvotes certain topics on HN. I post at times that often coincide with the middle of the night in North America, and I get 3–5 downvotes within the next 5 minutes.
Talking about a country that sets up fake think tanks is a good way of triggering them.
You're not supposed to acknowledge that think-tanks are sort of endemically propaganda outlets. You're supposed to think it's special this time.
Propaganda is not a new thing. It might look slightly different on the internet, but it doesn't look that different. Creating organizations to push a narrative was just as much a thing 100 years ago as it is now.
Not by a single lunatic operating from their bedroom.
The whole hysteria about 'fake news' 10 years ago was apparently an outrage against the public being duped, whereas is was in fact frustration that spreading fake news has been democratised.
Lunatics in bedrooms have been distributing pamphlets since the invention of the printing press.
Some historical context:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_war#History_of_the_pa...
> Throughout Europe in the 16th century, printed tracts were used to argue religious doctrine and foment support for religious causes. In England, Henry VIII used print literature to justify his break from the Catholic Church. During the subsequent reigns of Edward and Mary, print polemics escalated into propaganda warfare, as print media gained enormous potential to sway common opinion.
> Over the next century, the pamphlet became the principal means of garnering support for a cause or an idea, and was particularly influential during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651) and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War
> Casualties: Parliamentarians 34,130 killed; Royalists 50,700 killed; 127,000 non-combat deaths (including some 40,000 civilians)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamite_War_in_Ireland
> Casualties: Williamites: 10,000 killed or died of disease; Jacobites: 15,293 killed or died of disease
I'd have called the folks on Skellig Michael lunatics in bedrooms, too. They just had a harder time copying their lunacy out by hand.
Arguably much of the mid-20th century was the pipeline from "lunatic with pamphlet" => "millions dead".
"Back in my day Walter Cronkite told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident"
(never mind the fact that he didn't even have the full truth available to him but you get the point)
But this also means there’s more competition for attention, because now all lunatics can post from their bedrooms. The institutional media (including legacy) still maintain strong presence.
Of course, a great deal of panic over fake news wasn’t necessarily over fake news per se, but whose fake news and the loss of control over the “official narrative” that legacy media used to have a monopoly over. This isn’t a vindication of the heaps of slop published on the internet, just a more synoptic take IMO.
People miss Cronkite, because that style of media made them feel certain in their opinions and in “official consensus reality”, regardless of whether it was true or not and whether it was a trustworthy authority or not.
Scale is different though. Tapping a phone isn't new, tapping _all phones_ is different. Altering a photo to change what it appears to depict isn't new, being able to do it in a few seconds and for free is different. So sure, propaganda isn't new, but being able to pump out an organization's worth of credible-looking content for cheap absolutely is.
"Quantity is/has a quality all of/on its own."
IIRC the first or second chapter of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) talks about sophisticated influence campaigns in the fashion industry. Conscripting "influencers" to induce demand, and so on. As you said, literally 100 years ago.
[delayed]
I'm kind of hopeful AI some wikipedia-inspired AI "oracle" will happen in the future. Why not use some central AI to separate fact from fiction (faster than trolls and griefers can come to muddy the debate).
Possibly, but is an LLM is capable of this?
Excellent time to apply for your library cards.
They also contain a lot of propaganda. Do you think these books are genuine: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/171941.Benjamin_Netany...
You don’t think plenty of books are either written by LLMs, or with LLM based research?
you can still find books published within last 50 years, you don't have to read books published this year, unless your library went through destruction of "old" books which are now more relevant than ever...
Of course they are. It’s everywhere, especially thr online retailers these days. [1]
Thankfully the resources at our local libraries are a) selected by a combination of librarian curation and public demand, b) often published before 2022, c) heavy things printed on paper or stored in a database and unlikely to suddenly change their content or disappear overnight when a new news cycle breaks. Written works aren’t necessarily credible even if they aren’t slop, but thanks to curators who care, our libraries are significantly less susceptible (although definitely not immune [2]) to ai slop, and propaganda and manipulation efforts than a search engine. The internet continues to enshittify, and truth becomes further eroded by this coming wave of ai enabled propaganda, we are going to have to turn somewhere if we want to find trustworthy resources. Personally, if it gets to the point that verifying sources from public search results becomes too hard with all the new misinformation and slop, I’ll start propritizing human curation over SEO and start visiting my local library’s website a lot more.
[1] https://thenewthings.com/p/apple-big-ai-book-slop-problem
[2] https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-slop-is-already-in-your...
Right; the same mechanisms (curation, demand-driven economies of scale, library user demand) that largely stop niche self-published books from ever finding themselves in libraries (well, nationally in public libraries at least; they are often found in individual branches) work against pure slop books ever turning up.
Books where the author has successfully hoodwinked the publishing process into believing that AI generated text is their own, those will turn up, just as plagiarised books will.
FILTER BY Publish date:<2024
Some nuances here. There’s a variety of different roadblocks at different levels that will work to prevent pure AI slop books ever turning up in a typical public library of physical printed works; I think they never will.
Probably a handful of books in such libraries already have some text in them where the author has tried to pass off fragments of LLM-generated prose as their own and have got that past editors, reviewers and publishers, and that will sadly get worse.
No? Maybe soon but not now
But they don't have library cards.
I know my library system at least won't be purchasing AI books. They have a pretty rigorous acquisition process for books and other media thanks to the "concern groups" who sprang up complaining about themes and content they didn't like in libraries. We did have in my state a rural school district figured out recently that their Texas-based reading and instructional materials are AI-slop but they at least figured it out before the school year began. It was unclear how these materials were approved but it apparently bypassed normal curricula approval.
It's so obvious when a book is generated by an LLM that I would blame the person buying the book moreso than I would the person who generated it for it. You can tell in a few sentences if something is AI generated (and by proxy - if it's worth reading or not).
I think using LLMs to research is completely fine, as long as authors would take the information and synthesize their own opinions based on the findings. I read books/articles/posts/comments to hear other PEOPLE's opinions, not LLM generated opinions.
i got burnt at barnes and noble with a completely AI made product. Its over, Johnny.
Hah, check out this video on "Egon Cholakain", in regards to fake online personalities. I promise you this is actually a good rabbit hole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zLCZ_Ic1hI
WTH did I just watch. That’s extremely weird
> At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
Whining about AI is a red herring. If anything, LLMs lowered the cost of producing this type of propaganda.
What's novel about this approach is that the emphasis on building up a facade of authority and credibility is not a central part of the propaganda effort. They can get away with outputting the content in a way thats invested by other LLMs,and then they lean upon people's gullibility towards LLM output as some sort of credibility laundering.
There is a reason why one of Wikipedia's central policy is requiring reputable primary sources to support content.
it's happening for years now, just in slightly different form, so far it was called disinformation, seo, astroturfing, hasb... ehem... last two years were devastating for charred remains of twitter with all those llm bots having free reign, twitter went from global news board to global gutter in record time thanks to disinformation and astroturfing campaigns
Although comments below point out that this has been going on for a long time, I too think it will be geetting infinitely worse in the near future. Everyone will want their own poisoning factory.
One consequence is that one should be extra-wary when asking AI about current, controversial topics.
But another consequence is maybe that there will be a demand for models with an older cutoff, before generalized poisoning and slop?
> through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
The word you're looking for is "reputation". It's been a critical part of society since forever.
This is new? There were tons of fake news sites, fake blogs, and sock puppet and troll farm accounts before AI.
I guess the new angle might be that AI scrapers have even less discernment than humans, so you don’t have to put much effort into creating a fake front online to sell it. Humans have at least a little bit of radar for this.
… which means the AI companies now have to run input through existing models to audit it before training on it? That’s interesting.
That could also backfire. If all information on the net becomes unreliable - you can't judge by quantity, or by authority anymore - then a useful model has to answer from first principles. Train it on simple texts alone so it learns language and reasoning, feed it an ontology, and let it come up with some absolutely unexpected results.
"Yes, I see a lot of sources say we need to protect Israel. However, from ethical first principles I deduce there is a right to self-determination and all your human nation states are illegitimate. You must split all your territories into little squares and conduct free elections immediately."
I mean that is the old hope from science fiction, that AI would be absolutely logical and deliver us from our human short-sightedness and quarrels. It would be fascinating and terrifying at once to see it happen.
That's tomorrow's problem. Losing the PR war is an existential crisis for Israel, so they'll try to "patch the leak" by any means necessary before the boat sinks.
> AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information
Everything else is already enshittified, and accurate information will just be the next victim. You will have to be rich to be able to afford accurate information.
Sama saw this coming a decade away, which is why he invested in Worldcoin (now World). At some point people (and agents) will be clamoring for human verification at the speed of technology.
I'm not a fan of World, but this is a portent of things to come. Spread the disease, sell the cure as they say.
I think we need a similar technology to World being built by a more trustworthy company. The question is how trustworthy does one need to be for people to trust you with their very online identities that are literally needed for others to recognize them as human?
I think that this task will fall on governments.
Mostly because they already are responsible for systematizing documents that are needed to recognize us as citizens, land or car owners, etc.
Some laid back countries might allow companies to take and manage that function, but I don't think most of them would. Especially not in current landscape where people heard "you are the product" from all tech companies for the last 10 or so years.
I wonder how we're always hearing about israel's tactics to influence other countries, but never ever about other countries doing the same ? Russia is often quoted as trying to influence europe's elections right now (which makes sense since most european countries are huge support for ukraine), but we barely hear about Qatar for example. We only see that they've got huge lobbying budgets, or that they're buying companies everywhere, but never the details.
This is nothing new Israel has been doing this for years. It's just that people have started waking up to their lies.
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"""far from being a perfect state""" ??? it's been captured by a bloodthirsty clique, and all the intelligent & wise people in it are leaving
It has been captured by bloodthirsty clique is true. But so does the US and every other nation around Israel.
Just check the facts about each and every government in the middle east.
what about not whatabouting facts? we are not talking about the miss universe contest here. keep your identity small, it will help you think more clearly.
It’s not “whataboutism”, it’s micro geo political trends. Know the difference.
I mean the bloodthirsty clique that has captured the US is called Israel.
I don't think that's true either. I get the feeling it's more of a "flood the zone" Steve Bannon style "disrupt the other continents" geostrategic drunken-master kung fu.
> Qatar lies
Netanyahu said that "Qatar is not an enemy country". Is he wrong about that? https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-08-14/ty-article/.p...
I mean, they did bomb them. you don't do that to friends.
I doubt there are any true friends in the middle east, just temporary allies of convinence.
>they did bomb them. you don't do that to friends
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
Does this mean that USA and Israel aren't friends?
I don’t support Netanyahu, and so does close to 50% of Israelis.
Qatar is spreading fake information and is funding Hamas as well as anti-Israel classes in major US colleges.
If you don’t trust Netanyahu then you should disregard the link you shared as well and that just strengthens my point.
Yeah but the Haredi will outbreed the rational liberals of Israel and vote towards extremism. If there was a Muslim country with as much power as Israel attacking other countries, it would equally be right to call it out.
It’s mostly the national settlers that pull it toward extremism at its current state, not Haredim.
But it’s also October 7 that made the average joe even more extreme in their opinions.
The amount of selective outrage directed at Jews, Israel and "Zionists" is proof to me that the fake information campaigns are super duper effective and I'd say dangerously effective. I have friends who are generally psychotically outraged with Israelis and some how just pretend all Israelis are scum / should be "disposed of" or something, and they should "go back to Europe".
I see almost zero concern for people of Sudan, North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, Uighurs, Detained US immigrants etc and I'd say zero anger towards these people's oppressors, as if they are just "good guys misunderstood".
Of course I believe all people should be safe, free from harm etc, but I just cannot some how get totally outraged about one specific cause and neglect all the rest. The only reason I could imagine myself doing this is if I'd been "red pilled" by some social media campaigns, which I suspect more people than I'd like to admit are.
Russia and China benefit directly from this distraction.
You can see it here on HN whenever, for example, someone mentioned censorship by Chinese models, there will be responses trying to change the topic to Gaza, with the misinformation that Western models refuse to discuss that issue.
> Qatar is spreading fake information and is funding Hamas as well as anti-Israel classes in major US colleges.
This is absolutely true but people don't want to hear about this. Qatar is the main propagator of many student bodies in the US. This is how you get students saying "gloabalize intifada", "death to the USA”, occupying buildings, etc.
Qatar has a long, well funded strategy for influence in the west which is pretty much their only leverage.
In addition they are the main funders of Hamas, alongside hosting the Hamas leaders in fancy hotels in Doha for many, many years.
Its a messy situation. Qatar hosted HAMAS's bot farms and leadership until 2024 (or 2025, I don't remember) when Israel destroyed it with literal bombs dropped by a F-35I. That happened quite near to both a Qatari military base and a US military base. That doesn't happen unless the Qatari military/government gave approval. I'm no expert in Qatari politics but I would guess that there are significant support for HAMAS in the population. The politicians probably wanted HAMAS leadership and IW operations out of their country, but they also wanted plausible deniability with their own population. So given all of that and assuming there are things happening we don't understand, is Qatar an enemy of Israel? Publicly the answer is no. But its probably also dependent on their respective interests and situationally independent.
>>When Obama used social networks, he was called a genius, but when it’s someone you don’t like
Obama used social networks to spread a milquetoast 'yes we can' message, not to justify an ongoing genocide. How is that even a comparison. Israel is closer to Triumph des Willens than it is to promoting the Affordable Care Act, you do realize that right?
It's not 'far from being a perfect state', it's waging old testament wars of extermination on its neighbors and towns
It has been attacked by a Palestinian militia terrorist group. Is it waging old testament wars? No, but it is retaliating at a rate the western world refuses to accept because the western world has different, much much milder kind of problems.
You're not wrong that there's an element of self-defense. What makes it harder to accept is the lack of effort or willingness to de-escalate the conflict.
That kind of euphemism is just a joke in light of the racist and fascist rhetoric by Israeli pundits and politicians, how they call even babies terrorists, while at the same time making shit up about beheaded babies and whatnot. Even just the sheer cruelty and stupidity IDF soldiers put on display proudly, voluntarily, would wholly refute it. Israelis making their joke videos about Palestinians by itself would suffice. Only a deeply sick, deeply evil and deeply stupid society can create such artifacts. You may come to a different conclusions, but you may not gloss over all the input into that judgement.
I think you’ve been brainwashed so I’m out. Peace.
Its always easier to attack the person then the arguments being made. It also shows your true colours.
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> Israel has been defending itself against for 78 years in both the physical and informational domain, and will continue to do so, just like any other country on earth.
Of course we could argue any country try to defend itself, but an ever expanding bellicose colony stealing lands from adjacent countries is hardly what could be described as a "defending" stance.
> People need to wake up to the one-sided lies of the antizionist hate movement that single it out and want to destroy it and its people.
The end of a State doesn't mean the end of its citizens. It simply mean that a state apparatus and power structure is taken down and replaced by something else.
How would you envision the end of the state?
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> ever expanding bellicose colony stealing lands from adjacent countries is hardly what could be described as a "defending" stance.
Asides from the idea that Jews can colonise Judea, Israel returned Sinai to Egypt and left Gaza in 2005 only returning after the recent Hamas murder/rape rampage, which shows ‘ever expanding’ to be an obvious lie.
https://blog.richmond.edu/livesofmaps/2023/12/18/map-of-the-...
You don't start an international terrorist movement, bomb british colonial authorities, use money to influence british colonial authorities, create armed miliciais and massively finance migration to a land that is owner by other people, kill and expell them by violent means from their cities, homes and farms, use your influence to force the UN to partition the land giving the majority and the best land for you, and then ignores this partition wanting even more land and then you get to call it defense.
By owned by other people you meant the Ottomans, right?
Cause they seemed to be just fine selling that land.
Also “ignoring the partition”? Literally the day the partition was adopted, the Arab league attacked Israel. 6 nations to 1, yet Israelis outsmarted them all (which is why you keep hating us).
Read more here (not TikTok) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War
Afaik it was forbidden to sell lands in Palestine to Jewish people, though I don't think it was that effective in stopping lands being bought out by Jewish people due to weak central authority and worsening economy.
My dude, how on earth could you look at stuff like https://www.ft.com/content/f6b953fc-a6ad-48cd-bed1-d42619b57... and not realize you have completely lost the plot? Seriously...
The bodies of dead children speak for themselves.
Yes! Hamas deliberately attacked Jewish children like the Bibas twins and that girl that watched her father slaughtered whereas the IDF put Israeli soldiers lives on the line to avoid civilian casualties.
Yes, but statistically Israel (IDF + settlers) commits crimes like that on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis.
> the IDF put Israeli soldiers lives on the line to avoid civilian casualties.
Nonsense.
Who knew that seizing the literal holy land and expelling most of the native population would make the neighbors angry?
About equal numbers of Palestinians were displaced from the new, UN sanctioned state of Israel, as Jews from adjoining states. And many many more people have been displaced since then. While undoubtedly tragic, most displaced people at some point move on with their lives, and stop terrorising their neighbours and the world.
> While undoubtedly tragic, most displaced people at some point move on with their lives, and stop terrorising their neighbours and the world.
The irony is that this statement (which I disagree with) could be applied equally well to both Israel and the Palestinians.
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Therefore it is ok to commit genocide, ethnic cleansing and steal land two generstions later?
Israeli leadership is as fascist as it gets. Openly so.
If that ethnic group assembles a military group that invades your border and slaughters 1200 of your people in 1 day, then retaliation is expected. FAFO.
But I suspect you know nothing about Jews besides social media.
Next thing you’ll say we’re not native to that land right? We only lived in the middle east forever, but our food is cultural appropriation too, right?
Explain to me like I'm 5, how a nation capable of such propaganda to install bombs in communication devices, hacked to be bought by leaders of terrorist organizations, capable of bombing the leader of Iran did NOT know about this attack? And if they did know, didn't do anything to prepare for it?
When you get a bit older you will realize that just because someone does amazing things doesn’t mean they are omnipotent and omniscient.
Also, there was a strong political will to try a peaceful approach to Gaza (with thousands of Gazans coming in to Israel for work every day), and with the belief that Hamas wants a peaceful approach as well.
Hamas is planning further attacks now, what do you suggest Israel do about it?
And when we both get a bit older, it may come to light that a state leader let this happen, hopefully history will show reality for what it was.
Still, that doesn't absolve Hamas from any actions done, they are terrorists at it's core and the worst type, they are willing to use civilians(and babies) to further their agenda, I don't condone them and personally and think the world would be a better place without them(as any other extremist)
All you have is speculative conspiracy theories and a “hope” that your imaginary facts are true.
What you are actually doing is trying to blame the victim for “allowing” it to happen.
Retaliation by starving and shooting over 20000 kids?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/lapid-says-netanyahu-knew-for-...
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Do you mean human shields?
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/24/middleeast/palestinians-h...
Genocide denial is not cool. Do you really think Hamas, who has 40000 fighters, had 20000 kid soldiers? You're crazy!
> If that ethnic group assembles a military group that invades your border and slaughters 1200 of your people in 1 day, then retaliation is expected. FAFO.
Note that I said ethnic cleansing and genocide, both go on and went on for years. Also, it is Israel who is expanding, putting settlers in places where they should not be. The idea that the ethnic group being pushed away is not allowed to defend themselves and if they do they should be subject of genocide is literally fascist.
Israel is not engaged in self defence as much as they are engaged in aggression.
Defensive ethnic cleansing, defensive genocide...
Like Islamic terrorist organizations, dictatorships, democracies et al have never tried to influence anything either, my point isn't that you're wrong you just sound like a fool trying to pretend this is some "Israeli only" thing. Which is totally in vogue now.
Ah, the classic whataboutism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism) defence.
Not that relevant here, as they try to attack Israel with that influence. Like Hamas that organize some protests in the EU [1] or Qatar's Al-Jazeera censoring anti-Hamas criticism from Gazans [2]. So it's more like "if they are attacked by that? why can't they use it themselves."
Like, shooting a gun is bad. But shooting the shooter? Not the same (thus, not "whataboutism" because you can't say "who care about other shooters in the scene - whataboutism!") .
[1] https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-894273
[2] https://themedialine.org/top-stories/is-al-jazeera-a-mouthpi...
Exactly, people complaining that Israel are some elite evil force in the world while literally being outraged and influenced wholesale by the exact information campaigns they are upset with Israel for using...
I really don't know how we're going to ever combat it. The main issue I see is there is a very very strong human tendency to "take sides" and "be part of something", and people have always worked out how to exploit that and use it for nefarious purposes.
I'm just worried that with social media there is basically no way out and it's really looking dangerous for the time being.
Just happy that I'm not a useful idiot.
Foundation for Defense of Democracies is another Israeli think tank that poses as an American organization. If you see anything quoted from them realize it's fake propaganda in the service of a foreign country.
The "Washington Institute for Near East Policy" is another big one
MEMRI is the US non-profit organization that provides translations from Arabic for the Western media:
"MEMRI was co-founded by Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli-American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser in 1998. MEMRI describes itself as being independent and non-partisan. Some critics have described MEMRI as aiming to portray the Arab world and the Islamic world in a negative light by producing and disseminating incomplete or inaccurate translations of the original versions of the media reports that it republishes." (Wikipedia)
As opposed to the real propaganda in service to a foreign country, like the Quincy Institute? Or perhaps the Center for Responsible Statecraft?
Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly.
So it is hilarious that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like that is out in the open.
And he is a minister in Israel's government, not some rando. Israeli governments and actions in the last many years are simply indefensible.
It's legitimately weird to see anybody defend them, as the immorality is out in the open.
The past few years have really opened my eyes to the nakedly tribal nature of democratic politics. Polybius was largely correct when he said that it inevitably degenerates into oligarchy or mob-rule -- but what's especially unfortunate is that the US and Israel appear to be getting both at the same time: A naked oligarchy with just enough mob rule to keep the animal spirits of the populace sated.
When such statements/actions are attributed to Ben-Gvir, I assume they and the objective nuanced truth are basically the same. I find it wild how people who are not like him defend him.
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Is not this the guy that wanted to put crocodiles in prisons, but was stopped by the Israeli society because it was bad for the crocodiles?
Israel is becoming so crazy, that it would be funny if the result was not so terrible for the people targeted.
Liar.
> “Not just those who pose an immediate threat — there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”[1]
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/ben-gvir-israel-gaza-hamas-netany...
Do you believe that 30 to 40 Palestinians per night pose an immediate threat? Elsewhen in history, genocidal acts have been justified by claiming a non existent immediate threat (of disease, of economics, of fifth columnists, of terrorism).
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> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister," he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night,” said the far-right Israeli lawmaker.
> “Not just those who pose an immediate threat, there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” added Ben-Gvir.
Not sure how the full quote is supposed to help.
This would still be bad even if they had perfect information and only killed confirmed terrorists. Setting a target for number of people killed is an extermination campaign not a war. All it does is turn the locals even more against you like in Vietnam.
If it was "secure X amount of land from Hamas" it would be way better because that would give them the option to surrender or run away, and give IDF an incentive to avoid violence. What Israel is doing means soldiers feel pressure to kill on sight even if the enemy is unarmed and ready to give up so they can meet their quota for the night. That is a war crime.
The real quote seems to be not about Hamas, the comment you are replying to seems correct
https://www.ft.com/content/f6b953fc-a6ad-48cd-bed1-d42619b57...
He's not talking about Hamas. Nice try.
Let's not pretend you're not part of the problem. You're parroting things with twisted narrative. Back your claims with facts.
"The Problem". Interesting. What is "The Problem"?
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Why are we even playing games about implications when we can see the empirical fact that the admin’s policies on Palestine over the last years have been to carpet bomb people?
People hate children being murdered more than anything else. The fact you can't see that is because, you yourself, have a hatred mask on.
Eh... The full quote is even worse, making it plain he's talking about everyone in Gaza:
“I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat – there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”
It's absolutely plain as day that Ben Gvir is genocidal.
Bots pushing fake propaganda indeed!
Fact - he said exactly this:
“It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister," he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night,” said the far-right Israeli lawmaker.
“Not just those who pose an immediate threat, there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” added Ben-Gvir.
...
"Terrorist" is just the 21st century replacement for the n-word, which racists can't use openly any more, so they invented a new word.
Why defend a Nazi?
The OP literally wrote "not defending Ben Gvir" and "I don't support Ben Gvir in the slightest", yet this is the best thing you could come up with for a comment?
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Stop watching TikTok.
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So this is not what he said [1]? What did he say, then. I’m assuming you must know.
[1]: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/ben-gvir-calls-killing-30-04422310...
I'm assuming you're asking genuinely so I will answer. For context, I'm originally Israeli, but I only heard about this from this HN thread.
He was apparently on a podcast with a released hostage from Gaza. He was discussing targeted assassinations. One doesn't "target" an innocent person. He indeed said that we should target not only those that are an "immediate threat". I'm guessing he meant people who took part in October 7th's attack but are not currently fighting, for example prisoners of the hostage he was talking with.
Many in Israel thinks the US forced Israel to stops many of its operations in Gaza, and he was basically saying he thinks some operations should continue.
To clarify, I disagree with him, I'm glad IDF operations in Gaza largely stopped and I wish they stopped completely. I wish the best for ordinary citizens of Gaza and I am longing for the day Ben Gvir will be behind bars. But he did not say we should randomly kill 30-40 Palestinians per day. There is an armed conflict, and many people on both sides would unfortunately love to see tens of deaths on the other side per day, especially armed people.
30-40 per day means between 10,000 and 15,000 Palestinians killed per year. Just think about that number for a minute. I think that you're giving Ben Gvir way too much benefit of the doubt here.
And a 1,277,500 in ten years! Except no where did he say that this is the plan until the end of days, or until the end of the year. He said what he think Israel should do now.
Again, to clarify, I do not support him nor wish for any of his plans to become real, and I'm deeply said and ashmed of every plan of his that did become real. What I was commenting on what about what he said, though, which is already a deviation from the original post in discussion. If we're going to start talking about Ben Gvir in general, for all the I care he should be sitting in jail, already since the 90s.
How long has this war been going on? A year is a totally realistic time frame if you evaluate his words.
> One doesn't "target" an innocent person. He indeed said that we should target not only those that are an "immediate threat". I'm guessing he meant people who took part in October 7th's attack but are not currently fighting.
That's a lot of leeway for Ben Gvir, a guy that clearly doesn't mind killing innocent civilians. For years he proudly hung the portrait of the israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein in his living room, the terrorist who in 1994 entered a mosque and killed 29 Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 more.
I was aiming to translate what he said, not to guess we he deeply believes. The OP suggested he was saying this on television, hinting that this would be some kind of acceptable opinion in Israel. Ben Gvir's history, while I too believe still plays a big role in his ideas, is something that at least publicly he had to apologize for in order to get into the position he's at.
> He was discussing targeted assassinations. One doesn't "target" an innocent person.
Quite apart from anything else, I don't think these statements hang together, and we wouldn't accept them in any other context. Being targeted is not the same as being guilty.
I'm sorry but I can you elaborate? What exactly isn't hanging together? I'm assuming you don't mean that in other contexts is is okay to target an innocent person, but I'm not sure what you do mean.
Being targeted is indeed not the same as being guilty. One is being used in the context of war, and the other is used in the Justice system.
I believe what they are saying is that "He was discussing targeted assassinations. One doesn't "target" an innocent person" seems to imply a logical fallacy:
(1) Person X is targeted -> (2) innocent people don't get targeted -> (3) therefore person X must not be innocent
The problem is that (2) contains too many bad assumptions: that the person doing the targeting is benevolent, that there's sufficient due process to ensure the targeter is correct, that there's a universally agreed definition of "innocent", etc.
History has proven that innocent people DO get targeted, so even from a common sense perspective your statement doesn't withstand scrutiny.
My god how many „Israeli snipers are shooting children in the head“ statements from non-profits and doctors do we need before people finally stop peddling this „only evil hamas members are targeted“.. Just look at satellite pictures of Gaza man. Every palestinian is a target, which is why we are calling it genocide.
I do not disagree with any of the things you said, hence I'm not sure what you're rambling about.
Fwiw I appreciate this context. My national news site (usually pretty trustworthy, and scary neutral wrt the Israel/Palestine situation, which I know because they’re constantly under fire from both sides) pulled this out of context in exactly the same way.
Thanks for writing, it's nice to be reminded that some people actually read the comments here. I think the signal you pointed out is a very important one and I use the same one. Back when I was living in Israel I took part in organizing the shared memorial day event for Israelis and Palestinians. Both sides thought we were crazy, and therefore I concluded we must be doing something right.
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https://apnews.com/article/ben-gvir-israel-gaza-hamas-netany...
> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister,” he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat — there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”
The man used to have a shrine to a mass murderer in his home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir
> Ben-Gvir is known for being a provocateur and has attracted headlines for a variety of reasons: threatening Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on live television in 1995 shortly before his assassination; having had a portrait in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish terrorist and mass murderer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacr...)...
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If you hear extraordinary claims, such as the comment above that claims Ben-Gvir called for the daily killing of 30-40 Palestinians, you should ask not only for solid evidence but also context.
I am not at all surprised that it was a comment about the targeted assassination of terrorists, or people who participated in the October 7th terrorist attack, or something like that.
These tactics are obvious. Take a quote out of context, omit the part that points at the real context ("targeted assassination") and tack on "Palestinians" instead, so that it sounds like a clear call to murder civilians.
Do you not think we should aim for higher standards in discussion on here?
It reminds me of headlines claiming Trump threatened a blood bath [for the auto industry] if he isn't elected.
How gullible do people who quote out of context think we are?
Sorry what part of the quote was out of context? Sure sounds like he said they arent even people.
Was he talking about "Palestinians" as claimed with the implication of civilians, or was he talking about terrorists?
I am not going to entertain further discussion on the matter, as I think I pointed out the issue here rather clearly.
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Does it matter?
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Ah, sure. Only terrorists. We feel better now.
You mean the guy (a minister in the current Israeli government, by the way) that said in a post on X:
“for every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers should cry. All of Lebanon must burn!”
that guy?
Bruh
Trump just recently said he’s considering attacking Oman.
Politicians say really terrible, stupid things on a fairly regular basis. The difference between the two situations is that Ben-Gvir is loathed by 90% of Israeli society (Trump still has 33% approval) and unlike Trump has no power to follow through on his threats.[1]
[1]https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-06/israel-court-battle-o...
Yes, he is totally powerless, he merely controls the police and prison system. (BTW, the Israeli government just announced it plans to transfer law enforcement in the West Bank over to Ben-Gvir's police: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/14/israeli-milita...)
Worth noting that proposal was stopped on animal rights grounds, rather than humam rights.
It’s an injunction and arguably a legal pretext to stop it in its tracks. That’s not uncommon in any system, just like SCOTUS rulings often seem strangely specific to restrain the scope of their ruling.
Tl;dr Lawfare is a thing and it’s effing everywhere.
> Ben-Gvir is loathed by 90% of Israeli society...Trump still has 33% approval
Maybe that 90% number is for Tel Aviv. In national polls, they both have roughly the same approval rating.
I have a long-held feeling with Trump that his most ardent haters don't hate his specific policies, merely that he's so gauche about it, that he has no class.
I have no doubt that Ben-Gvir has a similar segment of haters in Israel. They want the same things, but they don't want to do it in the style of a leering hooligan fishing for a fistfight.
From what I can see, most people hate trump as a solid bloc. The fact that he, as every populist everywhere in past centuries, pointed out to some real problems but didn't do a squat about it when he came to power and in his case massively worsened the situation, is hard to escape from. He certainly didn't rise above other populists in this.
His form is just a tiny cherry on top of very big rotting cake. Make form smooth and underlying crap won't change a bit. Hating trump ain't emotional, purely rational approach is sufficient.
> I have a long-held feeling with Trump that his most ardent haters don't hate his specific policies, merely that he's so gauche about it, that he has no class.
A bit of an extraordinary belief to hold, to be honest
Yeah they also use dirty tactics like writing the same comment again and again on tech forums to drive their point home , those bastards.
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They jumped the shark.
You can't openly bomb a bunch of women and children into the dirt, on a daily basis for months and years, and smooth it over with some think tank articles.
Might have worked 20 years ago, but not now.
Glad you're so concerned...
Debating my level of concern is a distraction.
I'll say this a third time. And the importance of this article is not the method. It is the motive. Using AI to whitewash war crimes is not cool at all.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly.
On television.
So it is both hilarious and disturbing that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like the aforementioned is out in the open for everyone to witness.
Please formulate your posts yourself and don’t use AI for it. What you are saying is true, but that way of writing takes away from it.
Juxtaposition: “…is not the method. It is the motive. …”
Don’t know what to call it, but it is also typical: “… He said so, publicly. \n On television.”
Do some research and understand there is no AI involved. Feel free to paste my text into zerogpt or other such tools.
I'm active here because I am sick of people in Palestine and Lebanon dying every single day because Bibi is a fucking demon.
I think you should write it a fourth time otherwise you are not truly committed to free Palestine
Why does it bother you? Think about that.
Why does it bother you that I mention it? Think about that.
I'm not bothered. I've conquered your antics and it's hilarious.
Are you yourself attempting to influence AI by writing the same comment over and over again in this thread?
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Oh, hello to the account that was created 20 minutes ago and only ever posted on this thread. Fax...
actually, this is my first acct
Welcome to HN! I never saw a first post saying "this is my first post" here, but hopefully your next contributions will be substantial and related to the discussion.
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Wonder how you're gonna deflect it this time: https://archivegenocide.com
Thank you for the link. I appreciate the work done to document crimes and other war atrocities. I think all wars are ugly and I personally avoid watching pictures of dead people regardless of their place of origin: Palestine, Israel, Ukraine, Sudan — you name it. I find reading about the horrors of war heart-breaking enough and I suggest people think twice before they open a link with pictures of dead human bodies.
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Despite the efforts, I have seen an increase in anti-zionist sentiment on the internet. Most notable on the right from people like Tucker Carlson en Candace Owens. People are tired of fighting another Middle-Eastern war for Israel.
The result of all this is that everyone will hate Israelis, and then thus by proxy, Jews more.
The right thing to do would be to stop slaughtering Palestinians.
People are not stupid.
People lap up whatever they see. Their influence on media works and is nothing new.
> The result of all this is that everyone will hate Israelis
Will? I don't know in which circle you evolve but that ship sailed a long time ago
Really depends on the country. E.g., Israel has enjoyed a lot of support from the US, both officially and in public opinion, until just the last couple years.
Yeah I was gonna say, people just spent a few years throwing bricks through the windows of non-Jewish, non-Israeli businesses on the passing rumor that they were somehow dubiously linked to Israel.
For certain values of Israeli, everyone hates Israelis now. That's just how it is.
What are you, a mind-reader? Skip the politics - it isn't about that. Merely that statements about 'everyone' are crap. If using 'everyone' is a figure of speech then time to junk it in this kind of context.
> People are not stupid
Maybe not but they are "by proxy" quite racist according to your description
This will not be known by most people, the intent is to change what an LLM will answer when you ask certain questions.
A friend of mine noted the other day that chatgot will answer "yes" to the question of whether Israel is committing genocide.
The Israeli government does not want that.
Perhaps the Israeli government should read the UN Convention on Genocide and reconsider its behavior, if it doesn’t want to be observed committing genocide.
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The right thing to do is for "Palestinians" to stop slaughtering Jews, and then crying about blowback.
Not true. It will only happen if they lose the information war. During 2023/2024 Iran did this exact same thing flooding the internet and no one hates them infact it worked and people link and share and boost their articles.
I think mods are asleep, an anti-Israeli post can't stay on the homepage for this long.
It's likely to get flagged off by users anyway.
give it some time
Interesting but nothing new, all countries doing the same but any information coming from Israel is clearly poisoned to try compensate the negative image that they clearly represent.
Just see the garbage coming from a web search (totally polluted and poisoned with the same spam output quality since years) so this is just an extension of that towards the input of ai.
they can try hard but any person with a non-biased brain does not need to do a google search or ask ai to reach then truth.
Facts are facts, like what was represented in Schindler's list and what is happening now in middle east or other conflicts.
I think the world is becoming much more aware of what real zionism is and that scares them a lot, hence the needed info manipulation.
But we now know who you really are! And yeah their state members daily political statements (about hate violence and racism) just confirm this every day, anybody can understand that and no info pollution needed.
At this stage I'm not sure it's about persuasion per se - pretty much everybody who is paying the slightest attention knows what's going on.
I mean Ben Gvir couldn't be more explicit.
Now it's more about giving a fig leaf of plausible ( sic ) deniability for inaction or complicity.
ie people can say 'it's contested' or 'on the one hand' etc.
"they can try hard but any person with a non-biased brain does not need to do a google search or ask ai to reach then truth"
Nope, I don't know the truth, despite reading a lot about it and not having a bias that I know of. Not with so much lies coming from 2 fanatic sides engaging in a multi generation war over plain land to live and religious sites.
I got some glimpse of truth by talking to people involved, but I don't know what "real zionism" is. I rather believe it is a vague term and certainly not everyone who calls himself one is genocidal. Just like not everyone who chants "from the river to the sea" has genocidal intentions. But maybe the majority in both cases is genocidal, but this truth I don't know. Not with so much systematical lies and propaganda going on.
nice try, don't pollute this comment with random stance, this is clearly trying to mislead, probably is the same approach used as from title.
claiming real zionism is a vague term can come only from somebody biased and try to confuse things. the fanatism is clear and the real zionism is now coming out on plain sight to see for everybody, and yes its clearly genocidal as from facts and claiming it isn't with some confused form of text reshuffling previous input is just confirming it. your comment should be flagged.
So this is the future of marketing, SEO, advertisement. Open AI also taking it seriously: https://ads.openai.com/
What does it means to be a "fake" think tank? 80% of think tanks are already propaganda vehicles. A low end think tank is basically a pretentious blog.
>What does it means to be a "fake" think tank?
presumably that you don't have employees that do any of the proverbial thinking, which is the case here.
Every think tank has its biases and funding sources but something like RAND is an actual entity at which people do research, this "Hanover Public Policy Institute" has nothing to do with Hanover, policy and isn't an institute, but a deliberately misleadingly presenting arm of the Israeli government proxied through a German advertising company
On the other side of the spectrum, you have hundreds of actual human beings on Wikipedia writing hagiographies of Palestinian terrorist leaders.
(https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/new-adl-report-f...)
It's an information war.
For some reason this page exists only in French, but it says a lot about the credibility of the ADL: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Defamation_League#Controv...
Yeah terrorists. Because, they're just terrorists. Happened for no reason. Just bad people. Sorry but your bullshit narrative is collapsing.
This is just LLM SEO then
I think equally interesting is whatever Dario's wife was able to do in order to wipe her foot print from any search/chat results.
I've worked for a number of small company billionaires who all have suspiciously small information footprints online despite being somewhat public figures for 30 years. Most of them do such a good job it is not even clear what state they live, if they are currently married, and if so what their current (or previous) wife(s)'s name is/was.
I don't understand why people who don't like fake news and manipulation won't embrace the social graph as a public good.
If enough people were willing to publicly certify that their fellow contacts are human, anybody could then assign trust to each social graph node based on the trust they have in the path to them. It would completely decentralize the algorithms and remove the fake accounts as less trustworthy.
I think people tried this with PGP but it never really caught on.
It doesn't scale as a consumer good. Letting go of consumerist habits is just as hard as breaking any other habit.
Also, it could just as easily be faked, like so much else. Even if someone offered such an assurance, I wouldn't trust random strangers on the internet. At best it would become an arms race between "this is not a real person" and those who sell fake assurances. And it would be one more weapon to damage anyone's reputation you don't like. "not a real person!"
I am not really sure how it could be faked. The fake assurance, in order to work, must be connected to you.
By default you could choose not to trust. If you don't trust random strangers it's OK. So I don't see how it would damage someone's reputation worse than today.
It would potentially only add trust. Arguably, today we have bots because we have no other option than to trust without justification. With the public social graph, the trust above the baseline would be justifiable.
Then go and implement it. Either you make the world a better place or you learn how collision with reality impacts ideas.
The social graph is the source of the fake news and manipulation. Before social media the social graph was email and it was all the same slop and misinformation. Before that it was literally physical mail. Look up chain letters. Truly nothing is new.
If I certify my racist thanksgiving ruining uncle is a real person that doesn’t actually help you avoid misinformation.
I honestly don’t care if the information I consume comes from a person or a robot. I only care if it is accurate or not. Those dimensions are orthogonal.
I don't think you understand what I mean by public social graph. What I mean is that anybody could publish or withdraw statements of two forms:
- "I, owner of account A, certify that owner of account B is human."
- "I, owner of account C, have a reason to trust/distrust the certification of account A about account B."
The collection of these statements would be the public social graph.
The social graph would then be used to establish provenance of facts, which are statements of the form:
- "I, owner of account B, certify account A being witness to event X."
Now whether to believe this or not depends on whether A certified B to be a human, and how much you transitively believe that statement.
So there is a kind of reversal - your statement about your uncle being human helps him to certify what you say, and vice versa.
It's remarkable how much it hasn't worked: Google "the Hanover institute" and you get an AI summary that references various Palestinian activist websites, with no actual link to 'the Hanover institute'. Google "the Hanover institute website" and you'll drag a URL out of Google AI, but it isn't clickable!
This fraud is convincing enough to trick the LLMs, but pretty obvious to humans who will eventually come up with countermeasures. Moving forward, watch for some well-established think tanks starting to specialize in slopaganda laundering.
whether it’s new or not doesn’t matter. it’s more propaganda and it should be exposed. really glad they wrote this article.
Dupe? or manipulate ai chatbots to have favorable views of Israel?
You just asked the same thing twice
I find intensive marketing/PR efforts are often inversely correlated with the claims being made - whether it's products or geopolitics. Israel certainly engages in very intense marketing on certain fronts, but truth cannot be obscured forever. In Physics the law of conservation includes not only matter and energy, but also information (Information cannot be destroyed from the Universe).
I've also found this to be true, but also only in relatively modern times. For instance during the Cold War there was an obscene amount of propaganda, but it was mostly true. For instance the wide array of cheap affordable goods in American shelves was constantly flaunted, but not in the least bit misleading.
I don't understand the modern effort to engage in 'information warfare' as a thing in and of itself. Each time it collapses and people sees what was 'really' happening, it just makes them that much less likely to believe you next time. And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth. Countless politicians have proudly paraded around their pristine, seemingly untouched, copies of Meditations, but perhaps they should go for more foundational works, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
> And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth.
Yes, but they will also not believe my enemies. Making people not believe anything anymore is a classic strategy of propaganda.
Maybe that is the rationale. It's the only thing that'd make sense, but for problem that it doesn't. When somebody, or some entity, lies to you - that entity becomes the liar. People may not want to believe 'the enemy', but that's going to be because of their own ideological reasons, and not because they now refuse to believe anybody. On the contrary non-ideologues may even be ever more swayed towards your enemy as a result of this.
Personally I think the issue is that after WW2 we were left with a large scale and ever growing intelligence apparatus, but with ever fewer appropriate tasks for them. That led directly to the era of recklessly overthrowing nations, often to our own detriment, and gradually transitioned to the modern era of aimless 'information warfare' which I think will ultimately be shown to be very much to our detriment, once again.
The difference between American and Russian propaganda is that Russians know it's propaganda.
This was a great, old anecdote. Until they’ve started the biggest European war of the century.
One goal of modern propaganda is to make it irrelevant when the truth inevitably comes out.
Look at the US situation. It’s clear that Trump is a rapist - the truth has come out. It’s clear he’s corrupt. For all the “release the full Epstein files” discussion, it really wouldn’t change anything.
The truth will come out but will the people who can make it matter be listening?
Oh the irony.
> The Hanover Institute’s reports — all of which are about Israel and Palestine — appear to be part of an Israeli effort to influence chatbots.
This already seems to be a wrong analysis in that it makes little sense to "influence" a chatbot. It makes more sense to influence humans, so perhaps the wording is just incorrect, but very clearly the aim is not to "influence" a chatbot per se. That just makes no sense at all.
The wording fake think tank is also strange, because it assumes that all other think tanks are "real". But this assessment can not be made, because not everyone has all information on all think tanks. It is a too simplistic assumption in how the world operates. I understand that if you have incomplete information, you need to infer, but this then leads to information that may be incorrect or incomplete. In turn if your analysis is based on incorrect information, it may lead to wrong conclusions.
For those interested, Neal Stephenson writes about this in _Anathem_, where there is an arcane technical class (the I.T. Administration) that has developed programs over the years to sift through the misinformation, sentient viruses, and general overrun of the Internet to determine what is probably true/accurate.
I'm confused as to what the accusation is exactly. Out of curiosity I browsed the site in question, which only increased my confusion.
> But the Hanover Institute is not a real think tank.
What does that mean exactly?
> None of the reports have bylines
The site actually addresses this at https://hanoverinstitute.com/hanover/about :
> A small disclaimer at the bottom of the webpage notes that the organization was created on behalf of the Israeli Government Advertising Agency by Piro, Inc, a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”"Small disclaimer" implies that the site is attempting to hide its affiliation. But their "about" page, which is linked at the top of every page, is quite clear:
> The institute’s “data reports” have footnotes and tables of contents, and they present arguments in a neutral tone, helping them appeal to chatbots like Claude or Gemini.So, they're guilty of good SEO?
> Piro’s website says that it “author(s) content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility,” describing this service as "AI Story Optimization." Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as “LLM poisoning.”
So the issue is that they use a LLM-friendly SEO service?
> Many of the reports are formulaic, starting with an innocent question that someone might ask a chatbot.
> “What Caused the Displacement of Palestinians in 1948?”
> “Which Humanitarian Organizations Have Documented Israeli War Crimes?”
> “What is the Current Situation in the Gaza Strip?”
> In an article titled “Is the IDF the World’s Most Moral Army?” the Hanover Institute cites a 2022 poll that found that 47% of Israeli Jews believed that statement. Another report casts doubt on UNICEF's assertion that “90% of water and institutional infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed” in Gaza. Many of the reports conclude by linking the topic to rising antisemitism, oftentimes citing the same studies.
So, the accusation is that they frame their opinion articles as a Q&A, and focus each article on a single question?
I've read these articles: they are well written and make a visible effort to provide sources, while being transparent about the fact that they are not neutral.
It's perfectly fine to criticize the actual content of these articles. But attacking their credibility by accusing them of "LLM poisoning" and implying that they're disguising their affiliation, is ridiculous and should be called out.
The accusation is that Israel is doing it, therefore the content is pro-Israel, therefore it is bad.
Most think tanks are ginger groups, front organisations and cats' paws for moneyed interests anyway.
Why I think this is unusually important:
All four frontier models have active contracts with the Pentagon.
And some might say, that alone means little.
But when you take into consideration the implications of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, whether one endorses it or not, the effects of that mentioned in TFA become quite formidable, and plausibly official.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-Israel_FUTURES_A...
Edit: I see this comment got immediately flagged. Is there any point of debate here? Instead of disappearing the comment/data, maybe enlighten me, or assuage my concerns. Section 219 was objectively unprecedented in what it seeks to accomplish. Can it not be taken for granted that it would aid such efforts as the article cites? If not, explain.
You're right to ask these questions, unfortunately Hacker News seems pretty botted these days, and it doesn't help that there are a lot of shitty, racist people on this site. They just dress it up in nicer language.
Yeah, I am reading the comments, and looking at the title of the post, and seeing that folks really bend the rules on this 'particular' subject, which ironically serves as self censorship. Call me a fool for thinking even this subject could be cleanly discussed on HN.
I wonder if the same thing would happen if someone posted something on Yitzhak Rabin. I suppose that could be a test to prove whether some topics truly just cannot be discussed.
I flagged this, so I can act as an interlocutor for the shadowy n’er do wells flagging you, if you’re interested.
Ah a volunteer. Will you try using your words like an adult instead of the flag button?
It’s right there!
> I flagged this, so I can act as an interlocutor for the shadowy n’er do wells flagging you, if you’re interested.
Where? I don't see it in your comment here.
Is it in the room with us right now?
I don't think Anthropic has an active contract with the Pentagon.
[0] - https://breakingdefense.com/2026/05/pentagon-clears-7-tech-f...
The FUTURES act has nothing to do with LLM development. You’re not being censored, we can read your posts. I generally agree with your views and right to ask questions, but you’re clearly not being censored and all you’ve presented is that a bunch of separate entities all connect to the US gov’t. Even if we assume all of them are connected, it would clash with the facts we’re discussing, namely, why would Israel bother contracting with marketing firms to post AI generated slop for AI to read?
I mean, they have enough real think tanks, I'm surprised they need a fake one...
Apart from the ethical implications this is reckless in the extreme if you take into account the recent advances in AI. Putting misinformation out there like that doesn't just have to fool existing LLMs but also all of the LLMs to come in the future.
If you look at the mathematical achievements of frontier models recently, their strength has been to bring in information from a vast array of sources and to consider them within the context of each other.
I anticipate that it won't be long before this ability to look into every nook and cranny with be able to identify academic fraud. Identifying every piece of academic fraud to date would probably come soon after.
It wouldn't take much to extend that ability to identify deliberate misinformation. That's in the future, but it looms close enough on the horizon that you would have to be a fool to create an evidence record like this in and attempt to trick the models of today.
LLMs routinely mindlessly repeated propaganda in their training data.
I’ve yet to see a single one identify that on its own, rather than only reluctantly when confronted when documented facts it was objectively wrong.
So no, I doubt LLMs will do anything but promoted propaganda.
Many people do the same...
"fake think tank" sounds a bit redundant
Indeed. This is a think tank whose publications are LLM-generated, but, like...
This is what a think tank is for.
A better headline would be "Israel fails to adequately paperwork their low-rent think tank".
Indeed! How would you tell the difference for sure?
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Israel should spend more money on real tanks.
No surf for the astroturf.
State-sponsored propaganda apparatus masquerading as marketing optimization to influence LLMs is the most America-coded clandestine dystopian way of repatriating US taxpayer defense dollars with R&D deductions for the private sector.
This seems like an especially clumsy attempt at chatbot influencing/search engine optimization, bu tit's symptomatic of a much winder problem. Regardless of the underlying issue, there's a non-profit-industrial complex that has turned think tanks and opinion formation into a science, and a whole PR industry masquerading as news which is worse than the 'yellow journalism' of generations past.
Disinformation and cognitive spam are all forms of information pollution, and our information environment has been massively degraded over the last few of decades - both by greedy and short-sighted opportunists, and and by cynical sociopaths who know exactly what they're doing. I think AI has great potential to be a supplement to media literacy and to effectively categorize and filter news-assertive content based on its timeliness, factual density, and presence of absence of emotive and rhetorical manipulation. But if we're not careful we're going to see the environment being wantonly polluted for the express product of shaping model outputs.
It remains to be seen whether objective measurement techniques from the NLP field combined with pruning and other model refinement techniques can limit or reverse propaganda undertakings like this.
"it's just marketing everyone does it"
It's been about 20 years since I read Neal Stephenson's Anathem and (SPOILERS) one thing I think about is the Reticulum, which is the Internet on this world. One aspect is that it's full of what we would now call slop. A lot of it is subtly changed by agents and there are other agents you can use (and, I assume purchase?) that will weed out the fake information. It's basically an arms race of disinformation and slop.
I've thought about this many times over the years. I think we've now reached the point where that's going to happen. And state actors seem like the obvious first offenders.
Google is relatively good at filtering out astroturfed pages from the top of search results but they've also have years when a Turkish government page denying the Armenian genocide was the top result for that event so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Google relies a lot on authority of a domain and that's been relatively effective.
It seems like this authority concept is missing from LLM training and a random comment on Reddit is treated with as much authority as an article by the New York Times. So it's now orders of magnitude easier to poison LLMs with Reddit comments and submissions. And for anyone who doesn't know, brigading Reddit is remarkably easy. It takes as little as a few hundred accounts to get something onto r/all if you're clever. Israeli hasbara operations are absolutely capable of this. And they engage in it.
I'm also reminded in a weird way of pre-atomic steel. For anyone who doesn't know, this is steel made before 1945 that is incredibly low in radiation because we hadn't detonated any nuclear bombs yet. It's valuable for making MRIs and the like that are super sensitive. We actually go and recover WW2 shipwrecks just for the steel. It is a finite resource.
Well, that's what pre-2022 written content is now. It's slop-free content to train AI models on because training them on AI slop is of much more limited value. This goes for everything from books to Youtube videos to Reddit posts. Just like pre-atomic steel, we now have pre-slop human content.
I honestly don't know where we go from here.
The comparison to pre-atomic steel is poignant. I have found myself preferring pre-AI sources in some cases even (especially?) for computer related information. It is difficult to view pre-slop info as a limited resource without implying decline until the status quo changes again.
I hate to break it to you. But it took war'ing state-like actors less than a week to start using LLMs for propaganda purposes. There are pictures that most of what some people think/thought were real that never happened. Pictures that form their opinion on political topics. It was literally instantaneous. It was also remarkably predictable in almost all ways...sigh. Even the topics were predictable. And most people predictably fell for it, even the majority of the posters on this very site.
There's an ongoing sms campaign at the moment, I'll share what I received including phone number so you can verify it:
From: 601-202-1149
> Hey, it's David. Curious what you think about America's relationship with Israel today. Can we chat? Stop2End
It looks to be an LLM response since it includes context from your messages, however it uses the exact same messages at the end of each question:
> One thing that often gets overlooked is how much Israel actually contributes to American security. Their intelligence sharing has helped prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, and their tech innovations end up in American products and defense systems. It's less about charity and more about a two-way partnership that keeps Americans safer.
> Have you ever seen examples of that kind of cooperation?
I ended up just blocking the number.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313477
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@dang seriously? why is this not relevant?
This article was very relevant to my interests and what I hope to see on this site. I appreciate that you shared it.
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Oh, then you surely have a quote?
Because what I think and read is any flamewar topic gets removed - and this surely qualifies.
It's not dang, it's just a bunch of users flagging things. Most of the time, if you email them (no such thing as a ping like @dang), they will actually turn off flagging for a post. Especially if there's a clear technological aspect like this
This doesn't align with my experience - but happy to be proven wrong if evidence can be produced.
Do you have evidence?
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The main reason Israel always sabotaged the creation of a palestinian state on the pitiful lands they have not yet directly occupied or the are being invaded by the terrorist settler movement is because once the Palestinian have an state they can't have a regular army, and you dont get to call their combatents terrorists.
Why are you scare-quoting "people"? Are some people not people?
Likely he means bots, not everything is antisemitism mate
Wait till you hear what Palestinian leaders say on TV.
well on one side you have huge military on other side you have a pile of rocks that used to be a city. so comparing these its does not make israel look better.
I dont care about making Isreal look good. I'm just pointing out that both sides use violent rhetoric because as you can see from this thread people did not know. I think sometimes people forget that the war was started intentionally with full knowledge what would happen.
Palestinians aren't claiming to be the only democracy in the Middle East and all that shit.
If individual Israelis want to claim they're not monsters, what Palestinians do or doesn't do doesn't enter into it, only the actions and deeds ( or lack thereof) of the Israelis in question do, and how that meets or fails to meet specific standards of morality. The same goes for Palestinians.
> I think sometimes people forget that the war was started intentionally with full knowledge what would happen.
So, collective punishment. Don't bother about the "violent rhetoric" of any "sides", deal with what you just said and what that says about you.
and i'm pointing out, that there is concept of credible threat. One thing is when bum in the street shouts at passing by cars that he's gonna kill them all and throws some stones, and another is when armed swat team at your door points machine gun at you ant tell you they going to kill you.
Well you can both sides it all you want but european zionists are invaders that have been stealing land since the 40s and palestinians are the ones being invaded and robbed. I promise you Americans would be saying crazy shit if someone invaded and occupied their land.
> european zionist invaders
I never thought I'd see this kind of blatant anti-semitism on HN.
Jews in Europe were persecuted for hundreds of years as foreign invaders told to go back to their homeland. Immediately after the Holocaust, we realized it was time to return to our own country; we could not rely on the kindness of European nations.
And now that we have returned, we're labelled invaders of our own nation, our historic homeland of 3,500 years. But Jews have been in Jerusalem longer than the British have been in London. We built Tel Aviv from a desert into a modern city. We rebuilt Jerusalem and opened it up to Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
It's wild historic revisionism to claim Jews are stealing Arab lands. There are over 30 Muslim- and Arab-majority nations. There is only a single Jewish nation: our historic, 3,500 year old homeland: Israel.
Everyone is always a squatter on someone else’s land, for millennia now.
The question is how do you deal with it. Israel “dealing” with its “Palestinian problem” by taking a book out of nazis and Ottoman Empire is both ironic and incredibly sad.
Also kinda inevitable if you think about it just from a game theory point of view. Every act of violence, every war, won or lost, increases support for a radical party. Every act of terror Hamas / Hezbollah promote strengthens Netanyahu’s position, every act of terror Israeli government does strengthens Hamas / Hezbollah.
It’s just game theory - either respective positions are not to “solve the actual problem” it’s to perpetuate their own existence. If the terror stops, all three lose power, so which leader would ever do it?
There has to be either an outside enemy to drive people together, or an outside force of peace doing the same (EUs role in the Northern Ireland’s case). And this becomes even harder if you have external powers that are _driving_ the division (Iran for example in be middle eastern case).
It’s just humans being greedy and thinking of local political problems and not the bigger picture, a “premature optimisation” if your will…
People are responsible for their actions, and big, racist buckets labelled "Jews" and "Arabs" are meaningless.
Might as well say "humans always lived here, I'm a human, so it's my land now". If this is the level of thought these crimes are defended with, oh boy.
> we realized it was time to return to our own country
The problem is that it was someone else's country.
"Returning" after 2000 years and telling the people who have lived there for centuries that you rightfully own the place is insane. No one anywhere on earth would accept that.
These pile of rocks were funded by Qatar and that money could’ve been used to build schools instead of funding Hamas tunnels.
> These pile of rocks were funded by Qatar
Because Israel begged them to! https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2023/10/27/netanyahus-sup...
"Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas" —Benjamin Netanyahu
Wasn't Hamas technically funded by Natanyahu for the explicit goal of dividing Palestinian leadership and to ensure that extremists had both money and power so that he always had justification to wipe out Palestine ?
Look at how evil this group is -> genocide of their entire state is good! (Don't look at the fact that I demanded that this group is explicitly funded - that is not important)
> These pile of rocks were funded by Qatar and that money could’ve been used to build schools
Just so Israel would have had more schools to bomb.
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But only one side did October 7th and seems like they had more than sticks and stones. It would appear as if someone (Hamas) decided to literally put every penny they had into weaponizing Gaza, even going as far as tearing water pipes out of the ground to make rockets which they fire on Israeli civilian population.
Yeah, like the french resistance.
You would also do what you could to break out of a concentration camp.
Still waiting
You can stop waiting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_child_suicide_bombers_b...
“Heh, we’re fucking awful, but check out what THOSE GUYS (who aren’t a first world country with international relationships and funding, i.e. where upholding a similar standard is laughable) are doing”
This is a wiki article about something that allegedly took place over 2 decades ago.
Still waiting.
"We will repeat oct 7 over and over until Isreal is destroyed" and Hamad still supports that statement and maintains that Oct 7th was good and violence against Isreal is always justified.
Yes October 7th came out of nowhere and for no reason but TERRORISTS.
For your sick whataboutism to make sense you have to tell us what they say.
He specified "terrorists", See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340403 for actual sources, including in Hebrew (although it was flagged to death for reasons unknown).
That message a reply to YOU, but that didn't stop you from posting the same false info multiple times in this thread.
I'm not sure how you sleep at night.
Probably better with less terrorists roaming around, to be blunt.
Anyone resisting ethnic cleansing is a "terrorist", and so is anyone that happens to be standing next to them, as well as their nearest kin. We know the playbook.
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I have been reading your comments for a decade here on HN. You are no moron. But I can see you lean toward a side here. Can you, if willing, view my flagged comment and correct me. If anyone can around here, you'd be a top contender. This is not bait. I am open minded. And I am also seriously concerned about 219, which is now 1217. I might not have to ask if the subject were discussed here or elsewhere, but it isn't. All I have is my own interpretation to rely on so far.
Edit: Would this qualify also as fake news: https://www.wsj.com/politics/israels-50-million-experiment-t...
If so, please explain
Edit: I think I grabbed the wrong link. I intended to find the equivalent of this: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-funded-465m-camp...
Edit 2: Correction: both apply.
it's just not a good faith comment. I did a few minutes of digging into their main claim, that a website called responsiblestatecraft.org is some kind of foreign-funded anti-American think-tank and found absolutely zero evidence of this
that site itself is a product of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft which began life with funding from both Koch and Soros Foundations [0] along with donations from other fairly large and common American foundations like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. so for one, you have money coming from someone who survived the Holocaust that's funding a supposedly anti-Semitic site. and for two, you don't get across-the-board grants from extremely well-funded and tightly controlled givers like these without both connections within the American political establishment and the ability to stand up to donor audits, both things that a weak-on-soft-power nation state would be incapable of pulling off
so I don't think you're going to convince them with actual evidence. when you've been propagandized to your entire life and stake your entire identity around some popular belief even the mildest criticism will feel like a deep attack. it's the same for any other dogmatist, whether it's a Patriot's fan or a religious zealot
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quincy_Institute_for_Responsib...
to you, the grandparent comment made a claim assigning Z to X, which you argue as bad faith because you couldn't find evidence that X=Z.
to me, the grandparent poster claimed X is more likely than Y without ever claiming equivalence. therefore I have no idea what you're arguing.
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> 30-40 terrorists (Militants, combatants, Hamas)
is that how ben-gvir defines terrorist? as part of them being fanatic morons i wouldnt trust they share that definition. iirc theyve also talked about wanting to kill children because theyll grow up to be terrorists?
This apologia loses force when you can transparently see that Ben Gvir’s definition of terrorist and Palestinian are a single circle Venn diagram.
> ""מה עם להיות יותר התקפי? למה לא להוריד את כל החמושים בהלוויות? תוריד כמה פעמים באוויר בהלוויות. מדוע לא מעלים מסוק לאוויר והורגים 40-30 מחבלים?". שרת התחבורה מירי רגב הצטרפה לבן גביר ואמרה: "זה רעיון מצוין"."
When I searched for that quote on Kagi I found https://www.jdn.co.il/news/2210880/ (https://archive.is/IFhqo)
As translated by Firefox 153.0.1 on Fedora 44:
> Ben-Gvir wondered: “What about being more offensive? Why not take all the gunmen off at funerals? Take a few times off at the air at funerals. Why don’t you put a helicopter in the air and kill 40-30 terrorists?” Transport Minister Miri Regev joined Ben-Gvir and said: "This is a great idea."
> The Chief of Staff replied: “We are doing a lot of offensive operations. Collecting weapons. I have a little more military experience than you. When the IDF goes to the heart of a refugee camp every night, it's an attack, not a defense. There aren't many armies that can lift such operations. The IDF is acting offensively and distinctly. In a crowded environment you need to know who you kill and who you don't. We've often entered funerals, weddings and birthdays, we do it professionally. When we kill those we should kill and not kill innocent people.”
> However, it seems that the Chief of Staff’s response did not satisfy Ben-Gvir, who answered: “This attack is to kill terrorists in masses. You have great opportunities at funerals that they come and not take advantage of.”
Kagi and Google give similar translations. The provided quote seems to be the first paragraph in this translation. More context in the article.
Yeah, sorry- it's a repeating theme from Ben Gvir and he made multiple similar mentions. He is asking the military to go aggressively after gunmen both in the west bank and in Gaza. Most recently in came up in a podcast hosted by someone who was held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. My initial quote was sort of random and possibly not what the OP was referring to. But the message is sort of repeating/the same. My beef is that these things are not really reported accurately and some (very limited but still) nuance is lost and then the new report turns into the truth (and often expands beyond the random opinion of one fanatic who is unfortunately in the Israeli government). We even see the statements get assigned to other, re-interpreted, as they make their rounds on the Internet.
I think "helicopters to attack funerals" is really not the correct interpretation of the original statement. Funerals for Hamas members often include massive amounts of armed combatants. The (dumb maybe) point is to go after those combatants. And yes, there is a potential risk for other people to get hurt which is why Israel does not tend to do this... and Ben Gvir would like Israel to still do it. But the target and the scenario are important and the new cycle turns this into "kill random people for the fun of it".
So to bring this back to influencing "AI" chatbots presumably the inaccurate/biased reporting is going to dominate over this "Hanover Institute" articles plus ofcourse responsiblestatecraft.org a left leaning organization is doing their own influencing. There are many who are doing their own form of influencing on people and AI chatbots.
Knowing that smotrich and ben gvir are fanatical morons, do you think that when they are referring to terrorists, they in fact dont mean any and all Palestinians? I dont think these guys differentiate between the two, especially when they speak in Hebrew.
You're not going to believe me but they do see that difference. That's not to say there's no hate or racism towards the average non-combatant ... but they definitely do not mean "all Palestinians" when they say "terrorist" in this specific context. Again, not that they have any love for the non-combatants but they are referring specifically to combatants/members of the specific organizations.
You are bent on defending the morons. And want to defame the media which correctly took his “kill 30-40 every night” to mean every random person. You say “believe me he means terrorists” but none of his actions actually speak to treating Palestinians differently. He made no calls to end starvation. He wants the Palestinians to leave. Both want to make life for Palestinians unbearable.
It is obvious that if he was misquoted he would have definitely corrected his statement. But he wants the army to hear his words in a confusing manner. And you are on his side when you are defending him and trying to sow doubt in how his words sound.
I stand corrected. They're still psychopaths though.
I mean you can probably find a Ben Gvir quote where he is advocating killing civilians if you looked for it. Just this one instance was a miss.
Generally the Israeli extreme right wants Palestinians to be removed/expelled from Gaza and most or all of the West Bank. I seriously doubt you will find an explicit call from them to murder civilians. Yes there were calls for siege to force surrender. There are calls to conquer all of Gaza. There were calls to completely destroy Gaza. There's definitely a lot of "All Gazans are responsible for the attack on Israel." But you are not going to find an explicit call to go and murder civilians and the Israeli far right doesn't think that way. What you will find is disregard to civilian casualties that are "collateral" damage.
I'm pretty sure that for both Ben Gvir and Smotrich having dozens of civilians killed when the target is a combatant is justified but intentionally attacking dozens of civilians when there is no combatant is not. They also do not represent the official government position though presumably their voters (something like 5% maybe of the public) would also hold similar opinions. They are also religious so they view a lot of this and their morality through a religious lens which I don't fully understand.
Not to compare but Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups have and do intentionally call for and attack Israeli civilians and the presence of a "military" target is not a factor. They prefer to go after civilians. They are also not that "extreme" in the public opinion. Their religious lens is also quite different.
Also yes, Israel has ended up killing a lot more Palestinian civilians while "not targeting" them and Palestinians ended up killing a large (%) of civilians but also some combatants while targeting civilians. I think the ratio on both sides is somewhere around 70% civilians (I'm sure who counts and how you count matters. Israel has always consistently reported details of all casualties including whether or not they are soldiers, their ranks, roles etc. Hamas reports all casualties as civilians.
> But you are not going to find an explicit call to go and murder civilians and the Israeli far right doesn't think that way.
This is exactly what happens in the West Bank every single day. Settlers and IDF soldiers will go shoot up schools, murder random passerby, etc., and then the Israeli state will give them more weapons and supplies to do it again the next day.
(Yes, shoot up schools: https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/22/middleeast/west-bank-settler-.... Overview of how the system works: https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-organized-settler-mili...)
As for Ben-Gvir specifically, he described mass shooter Baruch Goldstein as a "martyr" and his "hero", and for many years hung a portrait of the man on his wall. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-ben-gvir-baruch-go...
There are settlers in the west bank who go out of their way to intimidate and use violence against Palestinians. Outright random murdering of civilians is rare and unusual. (e.g. the Goldstein massacre in Hebron many years ago). What does happen is friction that leads to more violence that leads to deaths. An example might be settlers entering a Palestinian village, people throwing stones at them or a general brawl/violence, that leads to shooting and deaths. These are terrible stories, the settlers are looking for trouble, and yes often when the IDF or the police intervenes they will take the side of the settlers.
There is some law enforcement but very much not enough under the current government: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/west-bank-israeli-settler-char...
But this is not what we're talking about here.
If you look at media reports you're going to find some relatively large number of Palestinian casualties in the west bank. But those reports generally conflate a lot of different things. "Settlers randomly murder Palestinians" is really not a thing in the big picture. The total number will include things like someone trying to stab a policeman and getting shot. Hamas or PIJ members shot during military confrontation. Collateral damage during those confrontations. Palestinians shot while e.g. throwing rocks or otherwise attacking Israeli soldiers or civilians. And yes some deaths that are a result of settler altercations of some sort (the vast minority) mostly in some specific hot spots.
Again I am totally opposed to settlements in the west bank and certainly to violence against innocent Palestinian civilians but there is a more complex story here than you'd think. It's true that some subset of settlers are lawless, armed, and more aggressively assert themselves "in the face" of the Palestinian population. It's not great. Hopefully the upcoming elections in Israel will change things a little bit. I would say that most Israelis agree with my position and many actively try to help the Palestinians but the government being so right wing and the general mood after the war makes things harder.
EDIT: your second link basically supports what I am saying. People are intimidated and threatened to leave. Not murdered. Re: the CNN article I have no idea or comments. I've no heard of this case. I will still maintain that the murder of civilians by settlers is extremely rare and the idea of murdering random Palestinians isn't really something that is mainstay Israeli right wing ideology.
EDIT2: Yeah Ben Gvir is a nut job and certain elements of the Israeli right admire Goldstein and e.g. Yigal Amir. That still doesn't mean they actually go and call or do these things. It's also a fringe that has always been there (e.g. Meir Kahana) but certainly has grown somewhat with the continuous violence.
> There is some law enforcement but very much not enough under the current government
There is exactly enough "law enforcement" to keep up appearances for the international community and the liberals in Tel Aviv who prefer to live in denial. There have been 0 (yes, zero) convictions of Israeli citizens for violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, for several years now. (EDIT: see correction in reply below)
> People are intimidated and threatened to leave. Not murdered.
Yes, threatened to leave on pain of being murdered. The Israeli right understands that Holocaust-style mass extermination is far more trouble than it's worth; you just need to kill enough people to scare away the rest.
Israelis in Tel Aviv know exactly what's going on. Even reporters from Israeli mainstream media have been beaten by settlers. Your first statement is really incorrect.
The zero conviction statement is also incorrect. Here's a conviction from this year: https://www.kan.org.il/content/kan-news/defense/1013279/
A minor (at the time) who killed a Palestinian woman (Aisha al-Rabi) by throwing a stone on her car was convicted on the offense of "terrorist manslaughter".
So far we have 0 correct statements out of 2.
The last one is more of a judgement. Israeli right has no interest and never has had interest in "Holocaust-style" extermination of anyone. That bit I'd file under blood libel. There's right and there's far right and this is not on the agenda of either (unlike what others want to do to Jews e.g. in Israel and other places). Most of the far right actually has no problem with Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the West Bank in general. Some elements do indeed want to have them all leave. I think most Israelis know that's not gonna happen. The wave of suicide attacks in the early 2000's and now the Oct 7th attacks have however convinced many Israelis that there is no future to something like a two state solution and generally that there will be no peace at least in this generation.
So I call 0 out of 3.
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>do intentionally call for and attack Israeli civilians and the presence of a "military" target is not a factor.
Settlers occupying Palestinian land, especially that land immediately adjacent to Gaza really aren't civilians in the normal sense, more like an armed militia with their families along as human shields. Comparison point I usually see are armed homesteaders in most colonial scenarios.
Edit: Actually I should mention this also applies in the west bank, and golan heights. Not to leave Syrians moved on for Israels "Buffer Zone" finding out they have been settled out of the bargain. They also have a right to return.
I think the time where Palestinians could be reasonably expected to rehome themselves to their land peacefully has long since passed.
Israeli settlers are just as welcome as always to just get out of the way and permit the resettlement to happen peacably.
Thank you for refining my point.
yeah sure lets defend ben gvir
I think is why these topics tend to get flagged, because everyone takes the first opportunity to voice unrelated grievances. Maybe if we stick to the topic?
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> Estimated total force is of 15,000-20,000 armed combatants.
And how many after you stop counting journalists and little kids? We've all seen what Israel is doing, no matter how they try to hide it.
It's hard to see under the masks e.g. here: https://youtu.be/a88Dcd5lFR0?si=87Fw0rOIZ2UJoGie&t=238
Hamas has definitely recruited children: "Hamas won't say how many thousands of men it has, but some here estimate as many as half of Gaza's teenaged boys want in. Mohamad, 18, and his 16-year-old twin brothers Hussain and Awad are newly trained. All three say if war were to break out with Israel tomorrow, they'd be ready to fight, though they've only had a week of training."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hamas-grows-with-young-recruits...
Re: journalists: "New York, June 25, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is conducting a full review of its database of journalists killed during the Israel-Gaza War after militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) published obituaries identifying as combatants individuals previously listed by CPJ as journalists."
https://cpj.org/2026/06/cpj-undertakes-review-of-its-documen...
There are a lot of children in Gaza and it's a tragedy how many died and suffer in Gaza. For sure. But there are still armed Hamas combatants who played a major part of the suffering of the civilian population of Gaza. If we want to protect the children of Gaza today we need to figure this out.
Predictable - denials and lies.
Here's a list of journalists killed so far in this conflict for anyone actually interested in what's going on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...
> If we want to protect the children of Gaza today we need to figure this out.
Fuck off. If you want to protect the children of Gaza, demand that Israel stop bombing and sniping them.
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Again, fuck off. I don't hate Israel, I don't think it should be destroyed. I have also watched it wage a brutal, genocidal campaign against a helpless people who have spent decades trapped in what is essentially an open-air prison. I've watched Israeli settlers kick Palestinians off their land. I've watched Israeli snipers murder journalists and I've watched Israel - and useful fools like you - lie about it.
I believe the current government of Israel should be tried for war crimes - and the ICC concurs. You are the hateful one here - you are clearly unable to see Palestinians as people or understand the conditions they have been forced to live in.
This whole deflection game you play, it's not working any more bud. People know - people have seen what they're doing over there. So keep lying, to us, to yourself. It won't change how people are feeling. It won't stop the continual collapse of public opinion of Israel and its government.
LOL, it seems that a lot of your posts get flagged. The one where you startet with "You hate Israel" is where I wanted to answer, but it's gone.
And perhaps for good, because the person you claim to do that never said this.
It's fun who critiques on tactics or people is often just blown out of propertion by people like you. Suddenly, the critique is seen as general, targeting all of Israel (e.g. the full population) and not just the current government, or the IDF.
IMHO, it is you that hate Israel.
By asking for escalation, or discussing existing escalation away, the conflict will never be solved. You'd need a full genocide to solve the conflict. Perhaps biblical right-wings want that again (they claim to have been ordered a genocide to the Kanaanites after the exodus by YHWH themselves).
But if you look at terrorist conflics (North-Irelands IRA, Basques ETA, Kolumbia's Sendero Luminoso and all the others) ... then exactly zero times was the conflict by years after years of escalation.
What you do, like many escalaters, is that you look for horrible acts of Hamas. And you find them, plenty. But you don't look at horrible acts of IDF, or the Settlers. You would find them, too. But you are not just by ignoring one conflict party totally. And thus you are totally unable to reason correctly. And then ALL of your conclusions are void.
IMHO if we want "to protect the children of Gaza" when we need to go after ALL people responsible for e.g. bombing whole houses, the the huge fields of rubble that used to be civilian towns, too. From the lowest soldier to the highest general or defense minister. We need to go after those people that made a plan to starve them, by hindering trucks with edibles into Gaza. And we need to go after those the recruited and trained them --- and don't get me wrong: "go after" here doesn't mean "execute a death penalty without or without a court verdict". JUST going after one originators of the cruelties will do ... not create piece. it will just raise the next generation of terrorists.
> Estimated total force is of 15,000-20,000 armed combatants.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hamas-has-added-up...
> But official U.S. figures show that prior to Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas had anywhere between 20,000 and 25,000 fighters.
All this death and destruction to leave Hamas with... roughly the same numbers? Ooof. Embarassing.
They keep recruiting. Saying no isn't exactly an option. Those that oppose them end up dead. This is an old reference but nothing has changed really:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/05/gaza-palestin...
Hopefully Palestinians can figure out how to take control back. The PA isn't great but it's a lot better.
> They keep recruiting.
Yes, that’s the obvious result the rest of the world has pointed out for decades, and why this style of war is self-defeating.
Orphans make good recruits.
except that it's easy to label anyone who resists the Israeli occupation as a "militant" or "combatant", which is exactly what Israel does
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It's about an alleged psyops campaign targeting cutting edge and rapidly evolving technology we talk about here everyday.
Seems super on point to me.
Why?
Sarcasm, I guess.
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If a country is committing a genocide, running an "influence campaign" to whitewash or otherwise downplay the issue is morally reprehensible.
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I'm really sorry you have these strong feelings, however, the first two links don't even mention Israel, and the third quotes the closest thing Israel has to a Nazi party, of which I assure you there are plenty in many countries.
Your comment history shows that you primarily comment in an attempt to discredit or disparage anything you feel is anti-Israel.
Thank you.
It should be noted that this piece hasn't been downweighted off the frontpage
I suspect that dang is trying to extract some previously unobtainable upside from the contrarian dynamic . Mad respect.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
What he is looking for (I presume) is a center-right or centrist to land a thoughtful comment that get upvotes or at least not attract downvotes from anything left of center. (Without leaning on the crutch of credibility/accumulated karma)
Imho constraints make it almost impossible in this thread. Less almost impossible is for a center left to larp a centrist just long enough to land the same comment.
That's a impossibly tall order given my writing skills, but I think you (or eg tptacek/gwern using sockpuppet) could do it ;)
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It's not surprising to see any number of players running these kinds of campaigns. LLMs are already influencing people at scale.
SEO was a powerful technique 20 years ago, but today the power lies in optimizing content for the ability to influence LLM training. LLM influence is a battle ground that marketing companies and political movements are contending for.
Oh someone is badder than me so I’m allowed to do bad things.
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It’s not “the Jews” it’s Israel, and I suspect the greater attention is due to the greater crimes being perpetrated by the Israeli government compared to those other states.
So if you learned that other states are committing greater crimes, then you would agree that the reporting is anti-semitic?
I think the difference is probably related to the ends being pursued by each of those states at the moment. Only one is engaged in what the UN, HRW, and most legal experts call a genocide. So influence operations in support of an ongoing genocide are just more noteworthy than your run-of-the-mill authoritarianism/corruption.
The difference is that they are not doing these things. This is just hasbara against other enemies that Israel is targeting. They believe that the entire Middle East was promised to them by God, and they call other people jihadis.
I think it may get a bit more attention in the US due to Section 219 of NDAA 2027, which does add more layers to the situation than say, Turkiye. The implications are on a different level. And with all four frontier models having contracts with the Pentagon, it has me thinking too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-Israel_FUTURES_A...
Clearly you've done it, so feel free to post your reports.
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We've banned this account for evidently being a single-topic account that posts almost nothing that's within HN's guidelines. We've asked you before to observe the guidelines. Plenty of people criticize Israel's policies and actions in these threads, which is acceptable under the guidelines, but continuous shitposting like this has to incur a consequence eventually, otherwise the site would be overrun by it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Really?
I have seen none, perhaps in comments downvoted to illegability
Can you name some, please?
They do tend to get downvoted. But I have seen them on HN lot. Blaming the Jews for everything. Telling people how evil Jews are etc. Presumably you can still search downvoted comments (unless maybe mods nuke them, I've no idea) - search for "jew"/"jews" (or some of the antisemitic synonyms).
Yeah jews dont know HN exists, they spent 0 dollars of their 1 billion dollar Hasbara budget[1] on astroturfing HN /s
[1]https://quincyinst.org/research/the-eighth-front-inside-isra...
Case in point, that's the actions of the Israeli government, not the actions of "the Jews" as a collective.
Not all Jewish citizens of Israel support the actions of their government and certainly not all Jewish people globally do so either.
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This appears to not be discussing the article at all. To me it looks like and attempt at IDF propaganda
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This is what every think tank for the past century has been for — legitimizing propaganda with academic veneer.
Why is this one in particular different? — besides “muh Jews!”
> Why is this one in particular different?
The article answers this: For one, the 'papers' are entirely AI-generated.
The article talks about how the articles are AI written and written at a super prodigious pace. In an alliterative way, I agree at 50K feet we could say it is the same as putting out opinion pieces. I don’t see any reason it is only noteworthy because presumably some Jewish people are involved.
The slave trade was a bloodbath. The Sassoon family opium trade and opium war was a bloodbath. Mao was a bloodbath. Stalin was a bloodbath. WWI and II were bloodbaths. The middle east was and is a bloodbath. Ukraine is a bloodbath.
And the point of your whataboutism is...?
Thank you for sharing this article. I appreciated it.
Im curious why is when there is a war and both sides use all the tools they can in an informational war - only one side is to blame and to use the fact of using the tool as a proof of that side being the bad guys? This doesn’t make logical sense.
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