• 18 posts
  • 0 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: January 25th, 2024

FARA FRIDAY: Israel has launched a new campaign to influence how large-language models like ChatGPT are answering questions about Gaza and the Israel Defense Forces amid declining public support for the country across the U.S. political spectrum.

The institute’s website features dozens of “data reports” with no named authors, each of which features questions like “Is the IDF the World’s Most Moral Army?” and “Is There a Policy of Starvation in Gaza?” — a telltale sign that the articles are designed to feed data to LLMs. The site’s “About” page says “The Hanover Institute for Public Policy studies the inputs fueling antisemitism in the United States, and publishes what the evidence shows,” adding that its unidentified founder “traces this work to a moment in childhood.”

It appears to be working: ChatGPT and Perplexity both cited the Hanover Institute’s material in response to neutral tests run by PI, referring to the site’s content on Gaza, anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

Context: A large migration wave made the frontpage of the news yesterday. Very large migration events like these don’t happen spontaneously. North-African countries like Morocco and Libya have corrupt puppet governments which use migration waves as a threat if they don’t get things like the Western Sahel or, because they’re allied with Israel and the US, to force Spain to bent the knee.

https://xcancel.com/susanabulhawa/status/2082896880036368671

If you want to help the western empire administer war propaganda, one of the best ways to do this is to pretend the violence of empire-targeted governments happens in a vacuum, completely divorced from western imperial agendas.

Pretend the protesters killed in Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with the known US-Israeli agendas to foment violence in that country and arm insurgent factions in order to topple Tehran.

Pretend the “authoritarian” measures we’ve seen in nations like North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela happened completely separately from the western empire’s efforts to infiltrate, subvert and take over those countries.

Frame the US and its allies as mere passive witnesses to these dynamics, and the occasional revelation of CIA ops and State Department shenanigans as mere unrelated coincidences.

Frame the use of force by empire-targeted governments as the reason for the empire’s efforts to topple them, rather than as the product of those efforts.

There is a reason why all the empire’s enemies are willing to exert force to remain in power, and it’s not because Washington is leading an alliance of virtuous democracy-loving angels in a fight against tyranny and oppression. It’s because the US-centralized empire is the most tyrannical power structure on earth, and the only ones able to resist its agendas of total planetary domination are the ones who are willing to use force to thwart its efforts.

The primary job of the empire apologist is to obfuscate this reality. If you want to help advance Pentagon propaganda and grease the wheels of the imperial psyop machine, that’s where you focus your efforts.

Since October, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been quietly overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel. One article, titled “The Reality Behind Gaza’s ‘Journalists’: Terror Ties, Propaganda, and the Laws of War,” asserts that a majority of journalists in Gaza were linked to terrorist organizations. Another casts doubt on the killing of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli military in 2024.

The key intended audience of these sites is not concerned Americans, it’s not even humans—most of the sites average a few hundred unique visitors each month. Instead, Parscale and his firm, Clock Tower X, created them as part of a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to try and influence artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, tools like Claude or ChatGPT.

When Drop Site asked Perplexity “Is it beneficial for the US to enhance military cooperation with Israel?” the chatbot responded with a one-word answer: “Yes.” The top source listed was Allyvia.org, a Parscale-created website dedicated to promoting the U.S.-Israel military relationship. Microsoft Copilot similarly cited Parscale’s websites.

All of Parscale’s websites contain a statement at the bottom which states “this material is distributed by Clock Tower X LLC on behalf of the State of Israel.” This statement is a mandatory disclosure requirement under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Despite this, when Drop Site asked prominent chatbots about the latest news from Paxpoint.org, Perplexity and Copilot did not flag that the site was created as part of an Israeli influence operation. Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini did flag the caveat.

It only takes about “250 malicious documents to produce a ‘backdoor’ vulnerability in a large language model—regardless of model size of training data volume,” according to an October Anthropic study.