NYT: Israel Launched Covert Social Media Campaign to Influence U.S. Lawmakers

HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Sheera Frenkel, thanks so much for joining us. You have a recent report out that showed that it – the Israeli government was working with groups to target US lawmakers and an influence campaign. Explain.

SHEERA FRENKEL, REPORTER, THE NEW YORK TIMES: So this was a campaign that ran just in the weeks following October 7th, and it was organized by the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs. It was seen as an effort to try and get more Americans, specifically American lawmakers on board with Israel’s point of view regarding the war. And they used these fake accounts that essentially posted as college students or parents on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and, you know, just fill the comment section of some of these members of Congress with comments like, well, you know, do you know this about the UN or are you aware about Israel’s history, about this particular thing? Just trying to kind of sow a narrative that they hoped would sway these members of Congress.

SREENIVASAN: So were there human beings behind each of those accounts, even though that might not be their identity? Or was this a combination of AI use as well?

FRENKEL: Yeah, I mean, in some ways it was a really innovative campaign in that while they were human beings that were making the, the top line decisions about who gets targeted or what kind of messaging they use, the actual words, the text were being generated by AI, specifically by chat GPT. And so it’s the kind of program where you can put in, you know, give me two sentences that would give the Israeli point of view or a pro-Israel perspective on this moment in history. And that chat program will write it for you and it’ll try to make it sound authentic. And if you’re not a native English speaker, that’s a, you know, pretty good workaround to try and get some texts that you can then copy and paste into Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

SREENIVASAN:Okay. So how widespread was this campaign? Do we have any idea of how much money was spent on it or how many different accounts we’re talking about ?

FRENKEL: So some of the internal emails that we were given named a budget of up to $2 million. That’s, that’s as much as we know, we don’t know how much was spent. We know that that was what they kind of dedicated towards it. And it’s the kind of thing that a lot of private companies are running now. And so we see some of these companies offering to run campaigns for as little as 15, $20,000 up to the tens of millions of dollars.

SREENIVASAN: Who were the targets? I mean, were there specific individuals that were, you know, on important subcommittees? Or is this just kind of a, a blanket towards all members of Congress?

FRENKEL: We did see them targeting a few members of Congress more in a more concentrated way than others. You know, for instance, they seem to be particularly interested in Black Democratic members of Congress. And we saw quite a few of those members of Congress receiving a greater percentage of the comments on their Facebook pages and on their Twitter accounts.

SREENIVASAN: Tell me a little bit about the types of posts that were being created in this campaign. What would they say?

FRENKEL: So some of the posts were imitating college students and just saying, I go to college at X University, at NYU or wherever. And I’m facing antisemitism, and this is the reality of being a college student today. And some of the posts just kind of pointed to Wall Street Journal articles, for instance, that described the UN hiring members of Hamas to work for their organization in Gaza. So it was a range of, of postings, but all of them were kind of promoting the Israeli narrative about why they’re in war, why they’re at war in Gaza, and why they feel they should continue to be at war there.

SREENIVASAN: And was any of this specifically disinformation or filled with something that was not factual?

FRENKEL: So most of what we saw was – it’s, it’s hard, you know, I I think in this particular conflict, there are people who choose certain sets of facts to support their position. And so a lot of what we saw was the pushing of narratives that they felt were more favorable for Israel. So for instance, taking news articles that had been written in some outlets and, and then regurgitating them and saying, well, don’t you see the Israeli point of view on this regarding hostages or regarding the way the UN has some issues in the way it functions in Gaza, the portrayal of who was behind the accounts was the part that was fake and that they were pretending to be American College students with, who were facing antisemitism on campus, for instance. So they would take something that’s, that’s likely true. There have been American students that have talked about facing antisemitism on college campuses. But they would pose these students and and pretend as if it had happened to them specifically.

SREENIVASAN: Is there any way to measure I guess whether it’s sentiment analysis or whether it’s the number of likes or retweets, how, what the reach was of this campaign?

FRENKEL: So I, I think only the companies only Meta and, and Twitter can really tell us how many people saw these tweets and interacted with them. The ones I saw did not seem to be particularly effective. In fact, there were a couple times on Twitter where I would see one of these fake bot accounts writing something, and then just underneath it it would say, this doesn’t sound real. This sounds like a bot, like this doesn’t sound like a human being. So I, I think Meta and Twitter have kind of raised their eyebrows a bit and said, we don’t, we don’t know if this was very effective. We don’t, we don’t think it was. But it’s the kind of thing that’s really hard to actually do a thorough analysis on.

SREENIVASAN: And how long had Meta or I guess now X known about these kinds of campaigns or accounts, and did they do anything about it?

FRENKEL: So Meta regularly publishes reports about these kinds of campaigns. They call them coordinated inauthentic behavior. What it means is basically like a country or a company is running some kind of campaign on either Facebook or Instagram. And so we have a pretty good sense of how regularly Meta takes these down. And there’s just, there’s, there’s lots of them. I’d say every three months we hear about a good six or seven of these campaigns. We don’t know about Twitter. Twitter used to disclose in a similar, in a similar kind of report, but since the company was taken over by Elon Musk, we don’t have that same visibility. And so we’re not sure how many of these campaigns they’re now finding.

SREENIVASAN: As long as there have been war, there have been, you know, sort of propaganda campaigns to try to justify the war or actions. Right? And so that’s not particularly new. And we know that governments have been trying to influence actions by members of Congress, say around a US election or around January 6th. So what was different, what was intriguing to you this time about what Israel was doing?

FRENKEL: You know, I’ve covered misinformation, disinformation influence campaigns really since 2016. This was really unique in that while we see these campaigns all the time, and you know, Iran, China, Russia, the United States, they all do this. This is just part of modern warfare. It’s really, really unusual for us to be able to document it from start to finish. And so through reporting, I went to Israel several times. I spoke to members of government there. I spoke to people at these companies like Meta. We were able to see from start to finish how a campaign began. A couple people having an idea of let’s target these members of Congress. Here’s how we’re gonna pay for it. Here’s what members of Con– you know, we had, we got a rare chance to kind of see the nuts and bolts of how these campaigns unfold. And that we very rarely get a chance to see.

SREENIVASAN: I wonder what was the reaction from members of the Israeli government when you are pointing this out saying, Hey, we, we have these documents. This is a campaign that’s been going on. It looks like you were targeting these members of Congress. Was there a response?

FRENKEL: Yeah, I mean, I’ll note the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs did issue a denial of the story and said that they were not responsible for this campaign. I’ll also note that we did speak to four people within that ministry that confirmed the campaign to me personally. Since the story came out, I’ve heard from a number of people across the Israeli government who are calling for an inquiry. They wanna know if there are other campaigns like this, they wanna know who exactly ordered this type of campaign to happen. And there’s some questions being raised about whether or not, you know, anyone more senior knew about the campaign.

SREENIVASAN: There was one group that was kind of the center of this named Stoic. Tell us a little bit about that, and what was their response to your reporting?

FRENKEL: Stoic did not respond to our request for comment for our story. The email address that had previously been on their website was taken down. And the LinkedIn posts that I had seen about them talking about their use of AI was also taken down. They’re a private Israeli company who advertise kind of political campaigns, and on their own LinkedIn page, they talked about using AI to run campaigns.

SREENIVASAN: So the official Israeli response says that they deny this, the company that was kind of at the center of this campaign, they’ve kind of gone dark and they’re not responding to you, but there are members of the Israeli government who are concerned about this. Right?

FRENKEL: Yes. And, and I’ll note that in the course of my reporting, I was shown emails, I was shown messages from within the Israeli government discussing, coordinating this campaign. You know, it’s, it’s, it is in the midst of war. Yeah. And there were a lot of different ministries, a lot of different groups were meeting to discuss how to advance Israel’s agenda. And I think the lingering question that I’ve heard from many members of the Israeli government is how high up did it go and exactly who ordered this type of campaign to happen.

SREENIVASAN: Are there ways to figure out how these different types of influence campaigns, you know – are we only gonna find out after the fact if we get lucky if some sources start to leak information? Or are there ways for us to see in closer to real time, Hey, we’re being manipulated here, that there’s a concerted effort.

FRENKEL: So I mean, and I’ll take this campaign as an example. In real time, people were responding to some of these accounts and saying, this doesn’t feel real. This language feels stilted. I just, I’m not buying. It was kind of a, the response that many people had on Twitter and on Facebook and Instagram. And so I do think that in real time, you sometimes just have that sense that something’s fishy, but to prove something is a campaign takes months and months of research. And the number of people that are dedicated to doing this research is quite small. So we certainly don’t hear about every single campaign that happens. And it takes the companies, Meta, X, Twitter, et cetera, it takes them even longer to come out with their reports when these campaigns happen. So we do see quite a bit of a lag or a delay about this type of activity.

SREENIVASAN: What surprised you about the internal communications, the emails that you saw about the impetus for this? The, the, I guess the, the – I mean, just, just how they were thinking about this process.

FRENKEL: You know, not – I wouldn’t say that they necessarily surprised me in that what they were after seemed quite typical of these kinds of campaigns. Let’s try to influence a member of Congress. Let’s try to influence the American public. That’s something every country wants to do in modern warfare. For me as a reporter, it’s just always super interesting to get that moment of like, oh, it was paid for by the government. It was actually, in fact, part of an agenda that was set by the Israeli government. It’s something we often suspect with these kinds of campaigns when we try to figure out who’s dedicating money to them. But we very rarely get that inside look.

SREENIVASAN: Do we have any idea whether this campaign is over, whether it’s been stopped?

FRENKEL: So I’ve been looking at some of the accounts that were associated with it, and as far as I can tell, Meta removed all of them from Facebook and Instagram. X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has removed some of those accounts, but I actually just checked yesterday and I saw one or two of them still active. I see them tweeting at, posting at members of Congress. Those members of Congress don’t seem to be responding. And, you know, the lines are quite the same. I think one thing that everyone should keep in mind is that in almost every single one of these campaigns that’s been run in the past by Russia, Iran, China, even when the accounts are taken down, it’s pretty much whack-a-mole. And they’re back within, sometimes within days, sometimes within weeks, within months with a slightly different handle, with a slightly different AI generated profile pick. So it’s, it’s very, very unusual for these accounts to be taken down and to go away forever, because there’s honestly just too much money and interest in keeping these types of influence operations alive.

SREENIVASAN: So if this campaign had targeted members of Congress in specific, did it work? I mean, what was the response? What has been any of the response from members of Congress that might have been targeted?

FRENKEL: So we haven’t seen a lot of these members of Congress responding directly to the bots themselves on Twitter. And we didn’t manage to speak to any of them before the story published. But there was one member of Congress, Richie Torres, who did tweet in response to the article, calling the people behind the campaign blathering idiots, and saying that they needed to be examined for their role in all of this.

SREENIVASAN: There was just a recent Republican leadership, Mike McCaul, Mike Turner you know, said that Russian propaganda has infiltrated their party. And I wonder, is there any method is there a place for government or anything government can do to try to decrease the influence operations from other countries?

FRENKEL: You know, there was a period of time following the 2016 elections where we actually saw several members of government, largely in the national security sphere, talking about, let’s get organized on this. Let’s fund researchers that can help us with this kind of work. Let’s put together an internal group within government that can come up with recommendations. We also saw the highly unusual step of the US government taking action against specific Russian hackers that were involved in the 2016 elections to – the, the campaign, sorry, to sway American voters in that election. So there, there have been moments in time where the government’s shown more, more of an interest in acting. I would say that in recent years, that’s kind of dropped off and we have fewer researchers. And certainly it seems fewer bodies within government that seem to be working in a concerted effort to make sure that at the very least, foreign nations are not trying to influence Americans.

SREENIVASAN: How significant has this conflict been when it comes to misinformation and disinformation? How do we, you know, how do we even start to measure the amount of kind of paid for influence that’s in the social kind of ecosystems?

FRENKEL: You know, at the very start of the war, we did a story looking at how countries, including Iran, Russia, and China were using the events in Israel and Gaza to push their own narratives. So for Iran, it was a way to push a narrative that, that the US and Israel, we united fronts, and that by opposing Zionism, you’re opposing American imperialism. Russia took a fairly similar line, China, slightly adjacent, they kind of spoke more about American imperialism globally. And so you saw a number of countries kind of using this moment in time, this, this ongoing conflict. I, I myself have covered the last three wars that have been fought between Israel and Gaza. And, and every single war we have seen more and more misinformation swirling around it. Not I will – no, not actually necessarily between Israelis and Palestinians. When I look forward in Arabic or Hebrew, it’s, it’s not nearly anywhere near, I would say the amount that I’m seeing in English and in other languages. So the interest of groups all over the world to use this, this ongoing conflict for their own agendas is certainly increased in, in recent years. And I think, you know, likely to the great detriment of people that are there.

SREENIVASAN: One of the things that I mention to friends about social media is if, if something makes your blood boil, just, you know, take a deep breath. Don’t start sharing it right away. And I wonder, it, it, it seems like the, the, there is a formula that outside actors know almost how to reverse engineer the algorithm and say, okay, well let’s create this type of content. Let’s make it as incendiary as possible. Let’s make sure that people get their blood boiling. Right? But this sort of, the, this is a little bit more nuanced. It’s not just trying to really get you irate and fill you with anger. It’s just, it, this seems like a more targeted approach when it’s trying to be pervasive in the members of Congress’s minds.

FRENKEL: It is. Although we’ll also prey on their emotions. I mean, I think that a lot is basic human psychology is you’re going to share something that hits out at you. So if you’re a member of Congress and someone claims to be from your district and says that they’re a college student, and that they as an individual are facing antisemitism on campus, that could pull out your heartstrings, right? That can make you feel badly for what’s happening for that specific individual in that moment in time. And then they call on you to continue funding Israel’s war effort, or they call on you to continue supporting Israel’s, you know, position in the war. I mean, they, they do prey on emotions, and that’s just because that’s what works on social media. Appealing to a person’s emotion has been shown time and time again to work across social media. Whether you’re a human being trying to sell something at a garage sale or an influence campaign, trying to move a member of Congress.

SREENIVASAN: Sheera Frenkel, the New York Times. Thanks so much for joining us.

FRENKEL: Thank you for having me.