TEL AVIV, Israel – Israel organized and paid for an influence campaign last year targeting US lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messages as it aimed to increase support for its actions in the war in the Gaza Strip, officials said involved in the effort and documents related to the operation.
The covert campaign was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a government body that connects Jews around the world to the state of Israel, four Israeli officials said. According to the officials and the documents, the ministry allocated about $2 million to the operation and hired Stoic, a political marketing firm in Tel Aviv, to carry it out.
The campaign began in October and remains active on the social platform X. At its height, the campaign used hundreds of fake accounts posing as real Americans on X, Facebook and Instagram to post pro-Israel comments. The reports targeted American lawmakers, especially those who are black and Democrats, such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader of New York, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, with messages urging them to continue to finance.
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ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot, was used to generate many of the messages. The campaign also created three fake English-language news sites with pro-Israel articles.
The Israeli government’s connection to the influence operation, which The New York Times verified with four current and former members of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and documents related to the campaign, has not previously been reported. FakeReporter, an Israeli disinformation watchdog, profiled the efforts in March. Last week, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, said they had also found and disrupted the operation.
The secretive campaign shows the lengths Israel was willing to go to to influence American opinion on the war in Gaza. The United States has long been one of Israel’s closest allies, with President Joe Biden recently signing a $15 billion military aid package for the country. But the conflict has been unpopular with many Americans, who have called on Biden to withdraw support for Israel in light of rising civilian deaths in Gaza.
The operation is the first documented case of the Israeli government organizing a campaign to influence the US government, social media experts said. While coordinated, government-sponsored campaigns are not uncommon, they are typically difficult to prove. Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and the United States are widely believed to support similar efforts around the world, but they often mask their involvement by outsourcing the work to private companies or channeling it through a third country .
“Israel’s role in this is reckless and probably ineffective,” said Achiya Schatz, the executive director of FakeReporter. That Israel “conducted an operation that interferes in American politics is deeply irresponsible.”
Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs denied involvement in the campaign and said there was no connection with Stoic. Stoic did not respond to requests for comment.
The campaign did not have a major impact, Meta and OpenAI said last week. The fake accounts amassed more than 40,000 followers on X, Facebook and Instagram, FakeReporter discovered. But many of those followers may have been bots and didn’t generate a large audience, Meta said.
According to Israeli officials and documents about the effort, the operation began just weeks into the war in October. Dozens of Israeli tech startups received emails and WhatsApp messages that month inviting them to take part in urgent meetings to become “digital soldiers” for Israel during the war, according to messages viewed by the Times. Some emails and messages were sent by Israeli government officials, while others came from tech startups and incubators.
The first meeting took place in Tel Aviv in mid-October. It appeared to be an informal meeting where Israelis could use their technical skills to help the country’s war effort, three attendees said. Members of various ministries also participated, they said.
According to recordings of the meetings, participants were told that they could be “fighters for Israel” and that “digital campaigns” could be conducted on behalf of the country.
The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs ordered a campaign targeting the US, Israeli officials said. According to a Times report, a budget of about $2 million had been set.
Stoic was hired to lead the campaign. On its website and LinkedIn, Stoic says it was founded in 2017 by a team of political and business strategists and calls itself a political marketing and business intelligence agency. Other companies may have been hired to run additional campaigns, an Israeli official said.
Many of the campaign’s fake accounts on X, Instagram and Facebook posed as fictional American students and concerned citizens and local voters. The accounts shared articles and statistics supporting Israel’s position in the war.
According to an analysis by FakeReporter, the operation targeted more than a dozen members of Congress, many of whom are Black and Democrats. Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., who has been outspoken about his pro-Israel views, was targeted alongside Jeffries and Warnock.
Some fake accounts responded to Torres’ posts on X by commenting on anti-Semitism on college campuses and in major American cities. In response to a December 8 post on X by Torres about fire safety, a fake account replied: “Hamas is committing the conflict,” referring to the Islamic militant group. The message contained a hashtag saying that Jews were being persecuted.
On Facebook, the fake accounts were posted on Jeffries’ public page asking if he had seen a report about the United Nations employing members of Hamas in Gaza.
Torres, Jeffries and Warnock did not respond to requests for comment.
The campaign also created three fake news sites with names like Non-Agenda and UnFold Magazine, which stole and rewrote material from the likes of CNN and The Wall Street Journal to promote Israel’s position on the war, according to FakeReporter’s analysis. Fake accounts on Reddit then linked to the articles on the so-called news sites to help promote them.
The attempt was sloppy. Profile pictures used in some accounts sometimes did not reflect the fictional characters they cultivated, and the language in messages was stilted.
In at least two cases, accounts with profile photos of black men posted that they were a “middle-aged Jewish woman.” On 118 posts in which the fake accounts shared pro-Israel articles, the same sentence appeared: “I have to reevaluate my views because of this new information.”
Last week, Meta and OpenAI published reports attributing the influence campaign to Stoic. Meta said it had deleted 510 Facebook accounts, 11 Facebook pages, 32 Instagram accounts and one Facebook group linked to the operation. OpenAI said Stoic had created fictional characters and biographies intended to replace real people on social media services used in Israel, Canada and the United States to post anti-Islamic messages. Many messages remain at X.
X did not respond to a request for comment.
On his LinkedIn page, Stoic has promoted his ability to run campaigns powered by AI. “As we look ahead, it is clear that the role of AI in political campaigns will take a transformative leap forward, reshaping the way campaigns are strategized, executed and evaluated,” the report said.
On Friday, Stoïcijn had removed those messages from LinkedIn.
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