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]
I'll be completely honest with you about what I believe: I think the the UK trial unequivocally proved that Johnny Depp is a violent and abusive. The US trial, which was only about defamation, was clearly a sham trial and did not address the legitimacy of the evidence (UK's case found clear evidence for 12 of the 14 alleged incidences of violence. It also established a clear pattern of abuse).
Depp's behavior during the US trial is textbook DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) and any abuse expert would be able to immediately recognize it.
The reason I "both sides"'d it is because
A) I remember reading about evidence that Heard's team also used bots (obviously much less successfully). I could not find that evidence this time. I am not personally critical of her using bots to defend herself but, if she did, it would still be a notable feature of modern highly public debates.
B) When it was all going down, I remember something like 97% of tiktoks being pro-Depp (I wasn't on TikTok, just read a study). My main goal was to get people to accept the reality that even legal teams are working with PR firms that run massive bot farms to influence public opinion. Regardless of my opinion on who is in the right and who is in the wrong. I thought if I took an explicit side, the male-leaning demographics of HN would be less likely to engage with my actual main point
Is there any writing outside of your recollection that says the Heard side was using bots? Afaik all reporting suggested it was one sided, and not her side
I haven't heard about Heard Bots myself, only the Depp Fakes. It's not an unreasonable question to ask for external corroboration when someone claims that something happened and their source is that they saw it.
Sadly, I am not invested enough to do research on this matter and uninterested in having an LLM convincingly tell me whatever it reads on the internet is the truth about this.
It's not disingenuous? The person you responded to linked to articles which said it was one sided. You said the other opposite, but provided no sources. I asked for some. It's a simple request that was made politely
---
The whole response is bizarre tbh. Talking about my "sudden" interest. I made one comment. "Deep in the chat". It's quite shallow. I am assuming this is a bot
Depp's bot army was clearly more widespread and more successful. The reality is that it was a mixture of bot armies and the hive mind taking off by itself. A sort of organic-synthetic cyborg
I think the big difference is that before the internet you'd need to be a Murdoch to be able to do something like this. A good PR firm could fool a number of news outlets into thinking something is legit, but it was a lot harder to convince a professional journalist than it is to convince the average Faux News watcher.
I used to believe that, but too many times I have been proven wrong. Remember when the "professional journalists" were screaming about a terrorist plot against the UN last year and it was just a garden variety SIM farm running fraud?
even with the internet you need a marketing company with the reach and ability, and social media platforms to use and abuse
the maturity of those platforms, their "we need to make big money" drive to allow obviously bad actors to work their magic, and the ability to automate is what has weaponized it
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.
the particular danger now is not that the outside influence is new, but that more and more people are depending almost entirely on the information communication systems for all of their information.
the war against in person gathering and the family unit has been pretty successful, as they were pretty sloppy ways to exchange information to begin with. but at the very least you knew you were getting an actual opinion from someone, and you had context of their personhood and background for which to base that opinion.
I mean, the US has always done this. Look at the atrocities in Indonesia. Just 20 years after saying "never again" to the Holocaust and we have Goodyear using actual slave labor from death camps. It was the US doing too. A mass killing on the scale of the Holocaust. The "Jakarta Method" was then exported all around the world, especially to South America.
I have been yelling about the thinktank "truth laundering" industry for years now.
They were instrumental in the whole "Uyghur genocide" thing where the only proof was Adrien Zenz suggesting there would be a possible future decline in population growth and called it a "cultural genocide".
The US State department has been running things like "Radio Free Asia" as state propaganda mills for decades. This has broken out into an industry of insiders getting board seats on various think tanks and churning out essentially policy desires as "studies". These studies are then used as citations for actual news articles to launder the policy desires into something that seems like a reliable source. Then people say "Look! this is really happening!" while 100s of articles are written citing the same untrustworthy sources, laundered through dozens of thinktanks funded by the DoD and state dept.
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.
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.
Sure, but you have to admit that the reputation of Russians abroad is not THAT bad. They're seen as skilled at engineering and well-educated. I think Russia's future might be sunnier than many here let on - as long as they stop fighting their neighbours. By contrast, I think that the future for Israel is far grimmer. It's funny though that most of my relatives are in the intersection of these two groups: Russian Israelis - and I think my disgust towards Zionism is rooted partly in hearing them.
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.
They view certain components of "The West" as their enemy - indeed, the very organizations which conduct the same operations against the Russian people.
There are no enemies - they are competing parts - competing for popularity, resources, power. This makes it possible to negotiate. Enemies don't, but competitors are a lot more pragmatic.
Anglo-/Western and Russian governments have been strategic rivals for more than two centuries. Britain repeatedly sought to limit Russian expansion that threatened its own interests, such as routes to India, access to Caspian oil resources, etc.
See also, the Great Game and the Eastern Question.
They’re enemies because they want each others stuff. Russia has a LOT of stuff that the British would be quite happy to ‘manage’.
> Russia has a LOT of stuff that the British would be quite happy to ‘manage’.
And vice-versa, which results in the polite games being played, where everyone knows everyone else is doing shitty stuff to everyone, but nobody will ever admit it because that might cause the shitty stuff to descend into a shooting war, which is something we try to avoid as much as we can.
From approx 2008 on Russia has conducted operations that are in no way ideological but have only the goal to destabilize western nations. Supporting extremist parties of all orientations, magnifying events in their propaganda to maximize discord without any ideological consistency. They also quite frequently kill people on western soil. Sometimes using radioactive and chemical weapons.
Please elaborate when the west has done the same in Russia.
Just stop. The moral altitude you claim is a dire fallacy. You don’t speak Russian, or else you would already know the answer.
And I’m pretty sure you know full well that any examples given to answer your question in earnest will simply be dismissed as “Russian propaganda” - just as the Russians dismiss Western claims as propaganda, or even ‘justifiable, given Western hostilities’ - but there is a long list of actions against Russia by western powers with the intention of destabilizing Russian society, which, if you make the effort to inform yourself by reaching outside your bubble, you can see for yourself.
Russians can make just as many claims as Westerners can, and the only difference is which side one is invested in: thats what you’ll believe.
No matter what.
But, just to give you some hints as to what ‘the other side’ consider a valid response to your query, I asked some actual Russians what they would respond, and here’s the list:
- Assassinations: Daria Dugina, Igor Kirilov, Mikail Shatsky, (and BTW, Russians can quite confidently claim that the Salisbury Novichok incident was a false flag intended to harm Russian standing in the world - “Russians aren’t the only ones who synthesized Novichok…”)
- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: 100% anti-Russian propaganda,
- The blatant censorship of RT in Western markets (although the Russians still have access to BBC and CNN, which they also view as state-sponsored anti-Russian propaganda organs),
- Emphasis on high military casualties (sometimes highlighting disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities from poorer regions),
- Coverage of economic costs, elite corruption, and contrasts between official narratives and frontline realities,
- Support for (or amplification of) Russian opposition voices in exile and independent media,
- The "UMBRAGE" Component of Vault 7, described by Wikileaks as an offensive Western intelligence/propaganda operation against Russia,
These operations are reciprocal. Both sides do it to each other, and you are foolish to deny it.
Otherwise .. I hope you learn to speak Russian and will start paying better attention to ‘the other side’, because that’s the only way you’ll get an answer to your question, legitimately. And even then, I doubt you’ll “believe it”, since we in the West live in a very, very tightly controlled propaganda bubble, to the tune of billions of dollars a year, which absolutely prevents any such sympathies for Russia from being expressed.
Our bubble is just like the Russian bubble, only its not in Russian.
One main difference is that those examples you brought up are ideological propaganda. RFE/RL try to amplify their message and yes, the current Russian regime is very antithetical to that message. Russian propaganda is not ideological, it tries to maximize the damage to western nations and uses whatever political and ideological message that will achieve that. They have been doing that for decades, which is something a hostile nation does.
As for the assassinations, those are wartime actions by Ukraine. Not sure how they are supposed to fit into our discussion.
As for Salisbury, so you found the story of these fitness supplement salesmen convincing?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okrdqM6hNrI
It has been my impression that not even Russia tries to push that narrative any more.
> those examples you brought up are ideological propaganda
These are the examples they were able to identify. And many of them could be so obviously identified because of ideological component.
The alleged censorship of RT is more a counter-propaganda move: RT is a Russian vehicle that engages in a number of psychological warfare ops.
And, BTW, the only thing Western countries have not done in Russia is assassinations with chemical or radiological weapons, possibly due to superior counter intelligence ops on Russia’s side. And because being identified was not in their best interest - unlike Russia, which is more easily identifiable up to recent times. At this point I am not sure how much destabilisation of the EU and NATO is coming from the US instead of Russia and China, which tended to be the usual suspects.
These days anyone can run a competent disinformation warfare campaign.
As well as the humorous implication that the West would be doing all the same nasty assassinations as the Russians, if it weren't for the brave and mighty Russian intelligence services getting in their way.
Ideology? Yes, pure hatred is ideological - no matter which side of the dialectic you choose to align yourself.
“American propaganda is not ideological, it tries to maximize the damage to Russia and uses whatever political and ideological message that will achieve that.”
Huh, what do you know, that can be “true” as well. And the US and its allies have been hostile towards Russia - actually, for centuries now.
I don’t find anything about Salisbury convincing - not the British investigations, nor the Russian ones.
And the reason for that is, the evidence presented never holds up in an open, public, liberal democratic court of law - instead, the ideological propaganda that “Russians are assholes because they kill people” is propagated in the court of public opinion, which is as vicious and banal as you can possibly imagine (or else we wouldn’t need courts in the first place), no matter whether you attempt to argue from the Russian or Western perspective.
Besides which, the moral altitude claimed “against” Russia by the West is simply a fallacy - you think we don’t murder people extrajudicially?
I’ve got an ideological point for you: dropping one bomb every 15 minutes for 26 years, mostly on innocent children, women, and men is wrong and should be stopped. Any state which attempts to stop that, gets my vote - but it is not going to be stopped by any state. It is going to be stopped by the criminal states’ citizen body, which is - as we see bright and clear today - completely and utterly distracted by the hatespew against the citizens of other states, intentionally, by the people dropping the bombs - because they also own and control the means by which ideological propaganda such as “hate Russia” or “hate the West” is propagated, and they use it to expand the market for their weapons production...
In short, you’re no better than any “Russian”, and neither am I. Our nations are murderous, criminal enterprises which produce mass murder at far, far greater scales than anything a trash can in Salisbury can produce.
So you are saying Germany and the UK have no right to see Russia killing people on their soil as hostile act because the US drops some bombs in the middle east?
The history is far more banal and less nefarious than you give it credit. Nobody gave a fuck about Russia. Russia was a self limited kleptocracy and everybody just ignored it because nobody needed the headache. That is why the reaction to the land grab in Georgia and later Crimea was pretty muted and everybody just hoped that Putin would be sated and ride into the sunset as great leader who took Crimea home into the motherland.
But he wants an empire, and an empire can not be an empire if nobody cares. So he overplayed his hand to sate his vanity. One of his first public announcements after the invasion was: "I hope I am now being heard.."
Well, the World heard and now it is raining oil in Moscow and the Russian provinces are getting depopulated.
I think that Germany and the UK have all the rights they need to prosecute the criminals that have committed crimes on their territory, and doing so openly and democratically is the right kind of justice.
But these incidents do not automatically give cause to hate the entire Russian nation any more than, say, the actions of the IDF and the Israeli government should be used to justify hatred of all Jews, everywhere.
Obviously, they shouldn’t.
> Nobody gave a fuck about Russia.
This is so untrue. Western empires have been trying to balkanize Russia and colonize its resources, aggressively - since the 1800’s up until the modern era. Russia has been demonized for centuries so that Western powers can have a justification for their war industries.
See, this is the problem with the lack of proper history education in the West. You can’t get your bearings from the History Channel alone.
And then, there is international law. Do you really think the US and its allies are law-abiding members of the international community, given the grand litany of human rights abuses, war crimes, and crimes against humanity that have been committed this century alone?
One bomb dropped every 15 minutes on an innocent life, for 26 years, does not give those next in line in the Western targeting sights much hope for peace. While Americans and other Western citizens (including Germans and Brits) are utterly myopic about this, the rest of the world are really not. The crimes against humanity committed by the 5-eyes states alone, far exceed anything that Russia has done thus far. By a huge, huge margin.
> “depopulated”
See also, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, Palestine ..
Wake me up when you start demanding justice for the war crimes of Mosul with the same ferocious tenacity as you call for Putins’ ears on the table.
This is the same nonsense many people screaming “antisemitism“ pull. Their comments are clearly about the Russian government with Putin at its head, the decisions the regime makes. They are clearly not talking about “the average Russian.” At no point has anyone mistaken your critiques of the US government for hatred of every American despite your use of “the US,” so why would you respond like that?
Don’t resort to such cheap tactics just to make a point online.
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.)
> Why are you being downvoting for sharing this relevant truth, complete with sources?
Agreeing with something doesn’t make it 100% unambiguously true/correct. There are also many reasons people downvote, you don’t know the nature of the objections. It’s not worth getting upset over.
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.
>the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority
not authority but circles of trust from real life connections. we had a nice brief moment of centralized asynchronous information exchange with strangers that was relatively trustworthy but we are going to go back to needing to talk to an actual human being in real time in order to receive an actual human opinion from strangers, and then on top of that we can built local caches that explicitly are not able to be contributed to by strangers but that your circle of friends and family may be able to use.
ive been toiling over some designs/implementations for making it digital but ultimately its a process adherence more than a tool thats needed. any old notepad and emails would work fine
It's already been everywhere for years. The most obvious one is any time someone says something bad about Russia or China, a load of comments pop up to say "Yeah but what about when america does <x>?". Never actually attempting to discredit the statement, just to steer it towards the US
The sheer volume of comments make it super obvious when it happens compared to normal conversation
> The sheer volume of comments make it super obvious...
Does it though? Remember that the Global South outnumbers the west in terms of population. And the west isn't really as politically popular as westerners like to believe:
As more and more of these nations come online (Redditors already complain about Indians "hijacking" the whole of Reddit), many in the west are experiencing the cognitive dissonance between what you've been told of how the rest of the world think about you vs what they actually think. (Of course, I am not discounting the role of State actors in trying to shape the discourse online, and I agree with you that is also a factor).
The weirdness is how quickly and randomly those comments show up. Back when I used Reddit, I could mention some sensitive topic in a random place and there'd instantly be what I think are bots voting and commenting on it, sometimes huge comments with tons of links that looked canned.
Also it's possible those are from some insanely online people possibly running brigaiding groups on Discord, but that's not much better. It's best to be away from that. Let them "win" their online arguments against each other.
This is a terrible topic, but if you can’t understand where the Nazi reference comes from with regards to the Ukrainian conflict, you need to read some history books. Start with Stepan Bandera who is still considered an idol by many in the current Ukrainian government.
Yeah but the bias on Reddit and Twitter was the other way around when Russia re-invaded Ukraine in 2022. Suddenly 20 billion Ukrainians online who all disliked Russia, with PhDs in European history (2014 onward) and also vaccines for some reason.
You may be misunderstanding some of those comments. It's not changing the subject, it's pointing out that you don't actually care about that bad thing or you don't actually think it's bad, because if you did then you'd also think it's bad when the US does it.
Hi I am a human for sure and I can say we humans like to point out USA hypocrisy every time others are accused of doing things the US has done countless times while pretending to be on a moral high ground. Please don’t be offended by that. Just try to look at yourself before throwing stones at others. Beep boop .
> 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 ingested by other LLMs among the reputable sources, 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.
An important nitpick: Wikipedia requires reputable secondary sources, not primary sources. You can't cite a politician's personal social media, for example, you have to cite reporting on those statements. This is part of Wikipedia's defense against novel research - it's supposed to be a record of what is commonly known, not a replacement for, say, Reuters or arxiv.
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.
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.
Jill Fields at Cal State Fresno have actually narrowed it down to a (temporarily successful, but not in the long term, obviously) effort by the corset-making industry seeking to stay relevant after WWI during which corsets basically disappeared and there was an organized campaign that was organized both in person and through trade magazines. Women's silhouettes basically took a quick 180 right between 1900 and the start of the war only to turn very very retro in 1919 and while the first was organic and resembled how styles change in the century prior, albeit much quicker, the 1919 switch was openly plotted out in writing that was published but in such a niche publication that I get the sense that people not in the industry didn't even know that it existed. The cite to her paper on Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=17641417785638413...
You might have to shadow library this one, but it's a good read. Interestingly it seemed to be something entirely separate from Bernays whose observations were based on a derivation of what began as a homebrewed effort in a corner of the market. Valerie Steele wrote extensively about the trends and the after life but the source seems to originate in corsetry and ended up being copied by the garmet industry generally in the 20s.
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.
But it absolutely wasn’t he was the most famous critic but everyone saw this who looked. Since most people didn’t dive too deep it was/is easy to post things with a spin and little real substance and people would take it is a fact because they really trusted the news outlets to not manipulate
Don't get me wrong, fake news is real. Obviously, always was. But the hysteria and the way "fake news" is used to this day to discredit everything someone doesn't like is definitely forever associated with trump (for me)
If "democratised" meant the same amount of power got spread out among the populace that wouldn't be a problem. But when disinfo becomes massively easier and we face floods from all directions, yeah that version of "democratised" sucks!
> 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.
Their current reach is unprecedented though, and the reach of governments or political parties engaging in mass disinformation campaigns has proved almost an existential risk.
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.
what's different is that the misinformation is designed to be ingested by LLMs to influence _their_ outputs, which are then presented to users as "knowledge" without necessarily attribution of sources. This is worse that the current state where you might enter a search term "morality of the Israeli army" and see a list of websites that are influenced by SEO-wrangling and paid ad word placement, but at least you can click on each website and sometimes get an idea of the bias of the website (if you read the small print) or maybe do a search about the website to see what others might say. All that is either impossible or much more difficult with AI generated content so 99% of users won't bother, but instead will go with "ChatGPT said that xxx".
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.
Plenty of books in libraries? I'd guess the incidence is relatively low. Libraries have limited funding, trained professionals doing the book selection, and a culture that fiercely loves books, authors, and readers.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe I shouldn't be saying this, but... There are already some niche technical questions that Google's AI mode will answer based on a single Hackernews comment. I've even seen my own comments used as sources. Some of them were wrong in hindsight.
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.
One of the things that I took away from reading about the history of the transatlantic slave trade was that rich people always get the ideas they need circulated.
I don't want to call all of those people liars, although I'm sure some are. But the incentive structures at least select and reinforce the people espousing whatever notions support and justify a profitable status quo.
Previously, the cost of that was quite high. You had to find a bunch of reasonably smart people and fund them for years to go around and say what you liked. From royal patronage to modern think tanks, it cost real money to shift a lot of minds.
But now given the incredible concentration in "AI" chatbots and their nature as text averagers, I suspect the cost of influence has dropped an order of magnitude. So I think we'll see a lot more of this.
> the cost of influence has dropped an order of magnitude.
This is a really interesting take.
You don't need an entire organized religion in order to disseminate your desired belief system anymore… you don’t even need billions of dollars. Hard to say what the cost of disseminating an ideology to a nation is now, but likely somewhere between a few bucks a whole lot of luck to tens of millions.
If that bar drops low enough, there is potential for a lot more ideological competition, and things will get interesting.
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?
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
It has been happening since people have existed. It used to be called propaganda before these, and rumor spreading since before the written word even existed.
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).
This is based on the assumption of facts existing.
There are many studies, but each can be wrong and they can collectively show a bias. Even things of which are the most non-political of facts can have very strong biases. Look at the Millikan measurement of the electron and how in created confirmation bias and an anchoring effect on some property that has absolutely no real world significance to the things people are tribalistic about (aka, no political relevance). Now imagine the same applied to fields like economics or psychology which do have massive legal/political implications.
For a different example, ask the question if X committed crime Y. There are cases where they weren't found guilty but it is reasonable to assume they did. But being found guilty doesn't make it a fact either, as some people are wrongly convicted. Some eventually are overturned, but even if it isn't, it still isn't a fact they committed a crime.
Then there is the simple ambiguity of statements. Language generally can't support facts. It is why legalize, and programming code, and math's are effectively their own languages. For a simple example, consider the Betrand paradox(1).
>Consider an equilateral triangle that is inscribed in a circle. Suppose a chord of the circle is chosen at random. What is the probability that the chord is longer than a side of the triangle?
Is the answer 1/2, 1/3, or 1/4? Well, it is all three at once, depending upon what you meant by random. Now, imagine how this impacts things like research studies, where the randomness is much harder to quantify and there is constant pressure to p hack a result.
> Look at the Millikan measurement of the electron and how in created confirmation bias and an anchoring effect on some property
Could you elaborate on this please?
But yes, the underlying argument is sound: extracting facts from the messy phenomenological reports about the world is extremely difficult, and cannot be done by simply taking a brain in a jar and having it think extremely hard.
Incorrect calculation led to some wrong value, I think electric charge. Subsequent findings showed a general trend towards a correct value. The general trend indicates that findings that were too far off were scared to be published for being wrong and contradicting existing studies, thus only small refinements were published, causing the slow drift.
Thus, the first well accepted study anchors a value and it takes much more work to get a new value established as correct after the anchor is set. Especially in a case where the experiment design itself is still solid and it was more with specific experiment (measurements slightly off, other values not quite correct).
Imo it can support the separation in meaningful ways. There are many political topics where opinions are flooding online forums much quicker than anyone with informed opinion can answer or digest them Having a quick reference for "verifying" statements would be useful. Sure LLMs are probabilistic but we don't have any issues using them for building software which runs as part of society infrastructure nowadays.
True, but software is very different to general knowledge. For example, it's easier to obtain reference documentation from the person who wrote the language. It's much easier to run tests to validate a given attempt. And the general discourse about how to implement a given solution or architecture is leagues apart from, say, the general discourse around the Israel-Palestine conflict.
I mean, a big RAG setup with a smart LLM ought to do it, right? Or even just locally provided knowledge database - given the size of LLMs, what's a clone of wikipedia and whatever else you'd need?
yes, but at least you know what Grokipedia is, just like you know what you're going to get if you read Truth Social, or the Jacobin.
but because the content is assimilated by GPT/Claude/Gemini and then mixed in with everything else, the bias is much much difficult to spot, making it much more effective and reaching a much wider audience (i.e., those who never visit Grokipedia)
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.
This has been happening since Gamergate. (Or am I showing my age by bringing that up?).
Gamer gate was a fully manufactured cultural outrage by some very bad actors over nothing. Unfortunately, that marked the first time an online platform was massively used to drive a wedge between humans. And the bad side sadly won. That set the precedent for all the bad things that came after:
1. Bots on social media commenting on divisive or contentious issues in a country
2. Rise of online incel/red pill culture
3. Rise of stochastic terrorism
4. Cambridge analytica causing a complete shift in the 2016 US elections
5. The gang of 12 who spread nearly 90% of the misinformation during the pandemic
Today, most people can't even tell if a song they like on the major platforms was made by AI. People read less. People spend less time in nature. People are more lonely and less likely to be in a relationship or have deep meaningful friendships.
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.
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.
I don't view Ben Gvir's rise to a position of powers as a product of democracy, as much of a product of artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid. More directly, his rise to power is a direct result of the financial support of Israeli settlements over the past century which could not have existed in the absence of such financial support: settlers were paid to live in a specific strategic locations, in a specific way that would further the Zionist mission (first exclusionary, later apartheid).
Any power structure will be twisted and corrupted in the presence of these state systems to give people like Ben Gvir (or Stephen Miller, if you'd like) the platform and power to unleash their naked evil on the world. This is not unique to democracy.
I think it's upon us - all of humanity - to denounce artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid. They are founded on principles that are misanthropic, asocial, and unhumanitarian. They have always led to an immense amount of suffering. But they are not inevitable, termination mode of democracy.
> I don't view Ben Gvir's rise to a position of powers as a product of democracy, as much of a product of artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid.
From my understanding Ben Gvir(who has very little overall support in Israel from the population at large) getting elected is more of a consequence of Israel having nationwide proportional representation which allows extremists to get elected.
Ben Gvir then managed to become a minister due to Netanyahu having insufficient support from moderates to form a coalition without having to work with extremists like Ben Gvir.
> I think it's upon us - all of humanity - to denounce artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid.
So most states in the middle east should be dissolved? It's not clear what you're actually advocating for in practice.
> They are founded on principles that are misanthropic, asocial, and unhumanitarian. They have always led to an immense amount of suffering.
So we should dissolve most states including the United States due to flawed founding principals?
> From my understanding Ben Gvir(who has very little overall support in Israel from the population at large) getting elected is more of a consequence of Israel having nationwide proportional representation which allows extremists to get elected.
The existence of the support for those extremists has the same root cause that I stated in my original message: the artificial and strategic neocolonial state propped up by outside financial support with the expressed goal of establishing an ethnostate that eventually and inevitably led to apartheid.
> So most states in the middle east should be dissolved? It's not clear what you're actually advocating for in practice.
You can't unscramble an egg. Dissolution of dysfunctional but non-anarchic states is obviously a hyperbolic solution that I think you're aware brings nothing to the table as a suggestion.
What I'm advocating for in practice is quite clear in my original post, but I'll state it again: we need to denounce artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid. Much in the same way that we denounce war crimes, sex trafficking, and slavery.
> So we should dissolve most states including the United States due to flawed founding principals?
Again, you're bringing nothing to the table here with hyperbole. But in a way, yes, during Reconstruction a more heavy-handed approach should have been used to eliminate with great fury and prejudice the cultural desire for an apartheid state in the South, and maybe prevented or softened 150 years of suffering for black people and their descendants.
> The existence of the support for those extremists has the same root cause that I stated in my original message: the artificial and strategic neocolonial state propped up by outside financial support with the expressed goal of establishing an ethnostate that eventually led to apartheid.
Do you attribute Palestinian support for extremism to a similar root cause? Opinion polling indicates the extremism problem is far worse on the Palestinian side, Israeli extremism trends tend to be fairly reactionary to Palestinian extremism(i.e. Second Intifada) historically.
> What I'm advocating for in practice is quite clear in my original post, but I'll state it again: we need to denounce artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid. Much in the same way that we denounce war crimes, sex trafficking, and slavery.
So you're just advocating just for more virtue signalling instead of actual concrete actions? I don't see how that would meaningfully change the situation on the ground as I don't see how denouncing the right for Israel to exist is going to do anything except push Israel towards a more extreme position.
> But in a way, yes, during Reconstruction a more heavy-handed approach should have been used to eliminate with great fury and prejudice the cultural desire for an apartheid state in the South, and maybe prevented or softened 150 years of suffering for black people and their descendants.
Are you suggesting Israel also take a more heavy handed approach when it comes to eliminating the widespread practice of teaching of hate and antisemitism[0] to Palestinians?
> Do you attribute Palestinian support for extremism to a similar root cause?
Defending your home and against genocide is not "extremism". Anyone who's familiar with the history of Palestine will understand why they fight for their homelands and families:
> Defending your home and against genocide is not "extremism".
The Nakba is not genocide, it might be considered ethnic cleansing but that's not remotely the same as genocide. It also wasn't just one side doing ethnic cleansing either, Israel has a large Arab minority population with full citizenship while the same is not true for Jews in other Arab countries or Palestinian controlled territories(i.e. Area A in the west bank).
Massive amounts of Jews were driven from their homes around the same time as the Nakba throughout the middle east and they are not fighting to take back their original homes. This idea that everyone can somehow go back to their original homes or ancestors homes only serves to perpetuate the conflict.
People flee from wars, sometimes that's simply the least bad option, I have ancestors that have lost their homes due to their home country losing a war of aggression but I am certainly not about to go fight to try and take back my ancestors homes. That's all settled history at this point.
> Anyone who's familiar with the history of Palestine will understand why they fight for their homelands and families
There's much more to it than just the Nakba, it's also the many years of Palestinians being used as a tool by Arab countries to fight Israel.
Keep in mind the UNRWA(UN agency which is in charge of Palestinian refugees) unlike the UNHCR(UN agency in charge of non-Palestinian refugees) does not have a mandate to resettle refugees which deliberately perpetuates the conflict. Arab countries also coordinated a refusal to grant Palestinian refugees or their descendants citizenship as a way to perpetuate the conflict.
Then there's the coordinated antisemitic terrorist propaganda taught to Palestinian children as well.
> The Nakba is not genocide, it might be considered ethnic cleansing but that's not remotely the same as genocide
It was absolutely an ethnic cleansing and the killing never stopped. Israel has been murdering Palestinians (and it's Arab neighbors), since its inception.
All of the things you're saying have been said by Zionists a million times, and presumably are being pumped out by the think tank in the OP to flood the internet with trainable propaganda. It will not work though, the truth is known by too many people.
> Do you attribute Palestinian support for extremism to a similar root cause?
Yes. But we typically don't call oppressed peoples "extremists". For example, I wouldn't call those who rebelled in the Warsaw Ghetto "extremists". I wouldn't call a 14 year old boy who has only known struggle his whole life under apartheid an "extremist". Apartheid also has had a lasting effect on oppressor / oppressed dynamics in South Africa in a sad and complicated way. There is a wrinkle that Muslim extremists fund Palestinian groups, but I view this as yin to the yang of Israeli settlement funding (also extremist). Two sides of the same apartheid coin.
> So you're just advocating just for more virtue signalling instead of actual concrete actions?
Calling everything one disagrees with "virtue signalling" is a tired trope. There is no solution that will occur in our lifetimes, because there is no benevolent and omnipotent authority that can snap their magic finger and cease the suffering that's occurring because of this apartheid ethnostate.
With my suggestion, I'm trying to prevent the next ethnostate disaster. Ideally, I would want our descendants to recoil in disgust when thinking of the concept of funding an ethnostate in the same way that we recoil in disgust at the concept of funding a sex trafficking ring. I will teach my children, and my children's children, that "A State for [] People" is disgusting, no matter what [] is - unless it is "A State for All People".
> I don't see how that would meaningfully change the situation on the ground as I don't see how denouncing the right for Israel to exist is going to do anything except push Israel towards a more extreme position.
It's not that Israel doesn't have a right to exist, you're putting words in my mouth. South Africa was once an apartheid state, and it continues to exist. Similarly, ethnostates need to find ways to transition away from being ethnostates. Being an ethnostate can only lead to crimes against humanity.
> Are you suggesting Israel also take a more heavy handed approach when it comes to eliminating the widespread practice of teaching of hate and antisemitism[0] to Palestinians?
If only I could trust the state of Israel to actually design a "heavy handed approach" that wasn't rape, pillage, murder, and terrorize. The Union could be trusted, but only barely. The Union famously allowed black women to testify against the Union soldiers who raped them. I could never imagine the state of Israel allowing a Palestinian to testify against an Israeli soldier who raped them. Not yet, at least.
> But we typically don't call oppressed peoples "extremists".
Many groups are oppressed to various degrees for various reasons but restoring to terrorism(especially against civilians) is arguably an extremist response. The two are not mutually exclusive.
> For example, I wouldn't call those who rebelled in the Warsaw Ghetto "extremists".
They were being exterminated. I don't recall there being much terrorism targeting German civilians during that rebellion either.
> I wouldn't call a 14 year old boy who has only known struggle his whole life under apartheid an "extremist".
It's not oppression that would make one an extremist, it would be for example holding extremist views such as the supporting of terrorist attacks against civilians. One can teach extremist views to a 14 year old boy, in fact it's often much easier to teach extremist views to children than to adults.
> Calling everything one disagrees with "virtue signalling" is a tired trope.
Advocating for more condemnation without proposing actual solutions is rather pointless unless your end goal is endless war.
> There is no solution that will occur in our lifetimes, because there is no benevolent and omnipotent authority that can snap their magic finger and cease the suffering that's occurring because of this apartheid ethnostate.
So we should just give up and advocate for policies that will clearly never lead to peace? Also an occupation is not the same as apartheid. Apartheid is race based discrimination while the situation with Israel/Palestine falls mostly under the category of citizenship based discrimination(which most countries practice to various degrees).
> With my suggestion, I'm trying to prevent the next ethnostate disaster. Ideally, I would want our descendants to recoil in disgust when thinking of the concept of funding an ethnostate in the same way that we recoil in disgust at the concept of funding a sex trafficking ring. I will teach my children, and my children's children, that "A State for [] People" is disgusting, no matter what [] is - unless it is "A State for All People".
The middle east is full of ethnostates, compared to most states in the region Israel does reasonably well at protecting the rights of minority ethnicity citizens.
> South Africa was once an apartheid state, and it continues to exist.
Sure, but I don't think black South Africans were advocating for the destruction of South Africa as a state during apartheid.
> Similarly, ethnostates need to find ways to transition away from being ethnostates.
How do you propose states do that? Israel is clearly never going to give Palestinians full citizenship when the Palestinians at large do not believe in equal rights.
> If only I could trust the state of Israel to actually design a "heavy handed approach" that wasn't rape, pillage, murder, and terrorize.
So should a different country or organization be trying to de-radicalize Palestinians?
> I could never imagine the state of Israel allowing a Palestinian to testify against an Israeli soldier who raped them. Not yet, at least.
Israel has allowed for testimony from Palestinians in cases to some degree AFAIU but I don't think simply being allowed to give testimony is really the main issue here. The real issues are more tied to the way justice is administered, systematic double standards and the way military law is applied to non-citizens. The lack of any sort of final peace agreement between Israel and Palestine is what perpetuates this system however.
Think we're done here. I don't see a cohesive theme that deserves a response in between your responses to very specific pieces of my argument rooted in deflection and whataboutism. I feel I've expressed my viewpoint sufficiently. I don't feel like debating the definition of "terrorism", "extremist views", "race", "South Africa", etc.
Thank you for holding your ground here. As frustrating as it can be to wade into these threads, pushing back brings some much-needed sanity to a conversation that otherwise gets drowned out by propaganda (or at least the one i'm used to as consumer of regular western media). Beyond the main points, this exchange is a useful case study in Hasbara and bad-faith debate tactics.
(whataboutism, shifting goalposts, and semantic traps designed to derail the discussion; demanding an immediate, comprehensive policy solution just to validate a basic moral critique is a funny double standard given that the Israelis themselves offer no peaceful policy solution or path toward equal rights)
Kudos for calling out these rhetorical games in the open
Well you are implying Israel should be dismantled , in the most optimstic scenario that still involves a large chunk of Israeli Jews finding another place to live.
illuminating thanks for sharing this point of view.
funny that recently I came to a similar conclusion regarding power structures being corrupted anyway at the end, independently from the starting political form, is like we humans tend to be corrupt and violent at the end.
how many "democracies" are currently at war? or are doing violent covert or non covert operations/strategies? who controls that?
"I think it's upon us - all of humanity - to denounce artificial states, neocolonialism, ethnostates, and apartheid. They are founded on principles that are misanthropic, asocial, and unhumanitarian. They have always led to an immense amount of suffering. But they are not inevitable, termination mode of democracy."
this is gold, we can close the conversation here :)
> we humans tend to be corrupt and violent at the end
On a big picture "we" the west are perpetuating a type of colonialism. On the invisible "other side" in the global south, the outlook on a statement like "every conceivable political system always leads to corruption and violence" is quite different, better things are imaginable to them because it means liberation, freedom from oppressive forces, and so on. In the west it is the opposite, its unimaginable because an end to the oppressive forces means "we", means history literally ends, it's circular it's why the west views itself as the peak of civilization nothing that came before or after is even conceivably better than us.
I’m genuinely surprised they aren’t here in this thread doing exactly that. The defenders pop up in every corner of Reddit any time anything related is mentioned. That there isn’t a similar effect here is quite interesting.
paul Graham is a very brave and vocal critic of apartheid policy of Israel. I legit almost cried when I saw one of this posts... Honestly it was just so unexpected. This place tows no line, and weeds out the bots
It really disturbed me discovering how many nominally liberal people who would react in horror at casual use of the n word are quite comfortable with genocidal racism.
As you said, nominally liberal. What Israel is doing is deeply illiberal, and actual liberals, if there are any left, don't support the Zionist project.
That's why support for Israel is such a good wedge issue that leftists keep hammering on. If a nominally liberal politician is willing to support such an obviously illiberal position, then what other fundamental liberal values are they willing to give up?
Use-mention distinction is lost on a lot of people. It's a useful test for whether someone is reacting to a word (e.g. "damn") out of pure emotion and conditioning, or whether they're acting rationally.
Unfortunately there will always be people across the political spectrum who pearl clutch over media they personally find distasteful. The question is do any of them care when the rubber meets the road in reality. Christian conservative, progressive atheist, all are capable of failing that test.
Not just “a minister”, but the Minister of National Security. I mean, yeah, the “you can’t judge the intent of Israel’s security policy by Ben-Gvir” would maybe hold some water if he was, say, Minister of Tourism (though if a Tourism minister was telegraphing genocidal intent that wasn’t that of the government, you still wouldn't expect them to stay around long, either) but...
Ben-Gvir's first date with his wife (who was 15 then, when he was 26) was at the grave of Baruch Goldstein, a mass-murder that killed 29 Palestinians. Ben-Gvir kept a portrait of the guy in his office for years.
Zionists want you to believe the conflict began on October 7th, when people like him have been running Israel for a long time.
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.
> “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 human."
Sorry, but there's absolutely no way to defend such a disgusting person. It's ironic how much they pull the Nazi card for sympathy, yet they are the closest to genuine Nazis that I've ever seen in terms of hatred and desire for genocide.
Truly unforgivable actions by the state of Israel.
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.
> 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.
Oh I sure do believe him. I just don't think it means one should be able to make up things regarding what he said on television.
As an aside: it's really sad to see how hard it is for people to comprehand complexities. One can be all for Palestinian state, against the war, think of Ben Gvir and Hamas as a similar evil, dedicate decades to mutual work towards peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and yet get some random internet dude saying things like "why are you defending him are you racist too!?!?!?!?" when all you're trying to do is to hold on to the simple facts in this conflict.
For what it is worth, I agree with you. So there is at least one other person out there who would like statements to remain factual. When the entire topic is already so emotionally charged, it seems even more important to attempt to just stick to being factual.
> 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.
Thank you for explaining. I did not mean to say the innocent people in Gaza were not targeted. Of course they did, and many times. I meant to say that in Hebrew (and I believe that in other languages too), when someone calls for "targeted assassinations", it precisely means targeting non-innocent people. The term is literally used as the opposite of "carpet bombing", collective punishment etc. The fact that innocent people were targeted during the war is clearly a crime, but again, it is not what was being called for in the aforementioned quote.
I can't comment on the Hebrew, but in English the phrase "targeted assassination" says nothing whatsoever qualitative about the person being targeted. It merely says:
Targeted -> this will be a specifically identified person
Assassination -> they will be killed
For example, a dictator might perform a targeted assassination on a rival, in order to stay in power. Innocence or non-innocence has nothing to do with it. Or to give a more relevant example, someone might target and kill a Palestinian so that settlers can take their land. Whether the Palestinian was innocent or not doesn't matter. The land was the objective.
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.
My point is that the Israeli government has been claiming, in every way imaginable, that their actions are „targeted“, when the evidence clearly shows that they are not. So when someone like Gvir says „targeted assassinations“, what he means (based on previous evidence) is „let’s kill some Palestinians“. What people say needs to be put in context of how they have behaved in the past.
We might as well just ignore completely what he said, and just say "look at him and his previous actions!" then. I agree this guy is an racist scum, I just don't think it justifies saying something like "Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly."
Hitler was terrible too but I don't go around telling people "He said kill all Jews on national television!!!" even if that's pretty clearly what he believed in.
So if eg Trump said “evil Spain, we will never trade with them again, as they are terrorist-lovers” your only option is to just repeat that verbatim?
Or would you have the ability to say “in response to Spain denying US access to military bases and air space for Iran war, Trump retaliates with economic sanctions”?
If I think this is exactly what Ben Gvir is saying, and if I can make a sound argument to back that up, why would I not claim that he said exactly that? Is piercing through veiled bullshit that politicians say now frowned upon?
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.
I'm sorry, but what does the current length of the war has to do with this? During an armed conflict one can be asked what they think needs to be done, and it doesn't mean that this is what they think needs to be done even one week from now. And again, even if he thinks so, it is clearly not what he said. If we're trying to guess what Ben Gvir really wants, I can only agree he probably wants terrible things. If we're talking about what is said on Israeli TV, then that's simply not what was said and I'd like to believe that it's not something the general public would accept.
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.
The point still stands, he is discussing taking out members of Hamas. These people are mass murderers and rapists, intending on planning more attacks, and are not worthy of life.
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).
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.
Definitively not a solid block. It's tempting to believe that, but no, John Bolton probably hates quite different things about Trump from you (and definitively from me). A lot of the opposition both outside the republican party and inside (such as it is), is probably entirely fine with bombing Iran for instance. Not mad he's bombing it, mad he's bungling it.
> 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
> “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?
> “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.
“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 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.
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?
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)
There's also supposed "UN watch" which is another innocuous looking Israeli front meant to sow confusion into decades long UN's attemmpts to deal with the mess jewish terror gangs in Palestine created by stealing massive amount of land from Palestinians in 1947-48 for their bigoted state project.
Who is saying that? And by acknowledging that the land was bought pre-war you're also acknowledging that the (explicitly colonial) Zionist project pre-dates the Holocaust. So it has nothing to do with "nowadays", that was more than 100 years ago.
The commenter referenced 1947. And said from nowadays PERSPECTIVE about THAT time that it's a "bigoted state project". I just reminded them that the project got its population (50%+) from Jews that ran for their lives. So his NOWADAYS perspective about that time is crazy. As from the first moment, it was about protecting Jews.
The only other alternative at the time was the US, but with limited immigration after WW2, it was obvious it couldn't be the whole story.
If you have further disagreement, please explain why in the same sentence he wrote "bigoted state project" and 1947.
EDIT: you added "(explicitly colonial)" before Zionism. And I looked at your comment history...
Your are deliberately misreading stuff... good luck out there.
My last words to you are: At that time before WW2, this entire area was under the Ottomans, so making a government there for Jews (enclave) by BUYING land, is colonial, and not what you try to say which is: "Kill all natives, we are the superior race". Because who at that time thought he could overthrow the Ottomans? But you don't care.
It's bigoted because it's exclusionary state for Jews, most everyone else is second class, including people on defacto annexed lands in the rest of former Palestine. Other people are such a low-life dirt to this state, that they just bomb, kidnap, steal and kill whoever they want regardless of state soveregnty. No thought to how that may make population of other state feel. Today they just bombed yet another country that did not do anything to them, because why not.
If it was not bad optics, and europe would not have the power to really fuck them up by actually cutting trade and giving them their own medicine, they'd be bombing europe these days for all the imagined wrongdoings.
Nice fanfic. Now explain how Israel has 2M Palestinians citizens and they are in every place, from medical to judicial (including supreme court) to political.
A settler colonial apartheid state is bigoted by nature. I don't understand your defense outside of the word "bigoted" making you upset when you should be more upset at the rampant colonialism and genocide being done in the name of religion.
Are you really upset because the descriptions make you sad?
Your have 3 mistakes in describing Israel as "settler colonial apartheid" alone. I cannot help you. Maybe Wikis or LLMs will or [1] as a start.
I am only sad about HN level of discussion, and how smart people in tech leave their critical thinking, kicking it out the door when the "I-word" is in the article/comment.
Judges from ICJ may need your deep learnings too, since they describe Israel policies as apartheid, too.
And as far as settler-colonial goes. Establishing your pet state on other people's land while driving out the original population with terror and violence and death marches to the front lines, while stripping them of valuables along the way and using them as human shields as Israelis like to say these days, while settling former population's land and houses, is as settler and as colonial as a [Zionist] group can get, outside of actual state establishing actual colony somewhere.
OH, we looking at ICC and ICJ? Then sure. But then, you will surely agree to never let a Palestine state to be? As long as Hamas is in control, as, after all, look at their warrants- such bigots:
about immigration I found interesting learning that:
- before 1948, zionist agencies only allowed young fit pioneers and wealthy persons to immigrate. used a strict selection process that excluded sick, elderly, and poor.
- 1950, law of return, "immigration open to all jews", in reality filtered by early state authorities and the Jewish Agency that did exercise administrative, medical, and practical prioritization favoring ablebodied pioners or youth in certain periods, while being overwhelmed by the influx of impoverished refugees and holocaust survivors.
- socioeconomic situation forced the state to prioritize young, healthy, and productive immigrants due to resource constraints.
- the selective immigration (Aliyah Borer) involved officials prioritizing healthier family units during the massive 1950s migration waves.
- cultural and social hierarchy biases led the Ashkenazi establishment to place Mizrahi and Sephardic immigrants into peripheric areas and transit camps.
and after learning this, you understand that there was and there always will be discrimination and imho that's often the result of selfishness.
All of this just show young country with shaky economy that cannot help elderly and sick. Nothing changes. But because yout lenses are the same, you will never see it.
Just because you're running from war or genocide does not give you any rights elsewhere. Also in 47' jews were not running from anything but poverty and fears of the future. There was no genocide anymore.
That explains a lot! Yesterday, I came across this article - Outrage In Oman Over Trump's Threat To Bomb The Sultanate... - https://www.memri.org/reports/outrage-oman-over-trumps-threa... and posted it on HN. But then, I had second thoughts as I had never heard of MEMRI and a scan of the website revealed a lot of antisemitic content and in general poor quality, tabloid like "hyped" up articles. The website also had no 'About Us' page that highlighted who runs it. All this made me suspicious and I immediately deleted the posted link on HN.
Yes. And these people have successfully managed to pollute the US information system with their "independent reporting" on the Middle East media for close to thirty years.
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.
I think the US has been like this since its founding. The genocide it supports is revealing not only the truth behind Israel’s existence but also the true nature of US foreign (and domestic) policy.
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.
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.
> 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".
It is so effective, because they make such an easy target of themselves all the time. Anyone following the news and thinking a bit and maybe also keeping track of their crimes, could easily believe any claims about any additional crimes Israel is engaging in. Their own behavior makes it very easy to believe they have done even more terrible crimes.
Escalation of conflicts into wars with any neighbor country, that isn't on a tree by the count of 3. Assassinations of disliked individuals, regardless of in which country they reside, just like Russia did in the UK. Inhumane treatment of prisoners. Incredible discrimination of their neighbors. Supporting violent and armed mobs, to rob people of their homes. Illegal expansion of territory.
I mean, with that sort of track record, there is not much we wouldn't believe they are capable of. And then you have completely delusional people online, who go maximalist in their attitude, trying to defend all of that and trying to lay claim to all the territory that Israel would love to conquer. That's basically the Zionists. I don't see how they are not loath-worthy, and I also haven't yet seen something like a "mild, non-maximalist Zionist", who would convince me of "not all Zionists are bad".
> 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".
That's because in some of those cases there is little influence that "the West" has. I do think, that you are grouping quite uneven situations there though.
Sudan: Inner country turmoil, civil war and militias. What exactly do you expect others to do? March in?
North Korea: Eh, well, a crazy dictatorship, armed with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. At least they stay contained in their own country mostly, when they are not sending meat to Russia.
Russia: It is being dealt with by Ukraine and its supporters. They are f'ed for the coming decades and maybe will even crumble under the looming economic crisis. All because their dictator couldn't help but invade a neighbor and doubles down infinitely.
Ukraine: But the West _does_ do something about it? I mean, did you follow the news the last couple of years? Ukraine's supporters are everywhere!
Uighurs: What exactly _is_ the situation? Have you visited Xinjiang?
US immigrants: How are they comparable with all the other situations you have mentioned?
> but I just cannot some how get totally outraged about one specific cause and neglect all the rest.
Then you have an eternity of feeling bad ahead of you. We have so many crisis and bad situations and crimes against humanity ongoing on this planet, that you will never be not outraged. I don't think we can "demand" outrage from others. A human only can show they care about so much. Gotta pick your battles.
Your own hyperbolic rant exaggerating Israel’s crimes, and justifying believing in additional imaginary crimes based on that, for all Israelis (and Jews, per your referenced quote), just proves OP’s point.
Some examples:
> Escalation of conflicts into wars with any neighbor country, that isn't on a tree by the count of 3.
Israel has had peace with Egypt and Jordan for decades (2 of its 4 neighbors with the largest borders).
It has gone to war with Hezbollah after months of missile fire that kept the north of Israel evacuated for more than a year.
> Assassinations of disliked individuals, regardless of in which country they reside, just like Russia did in the UK
This is disingenuous. Russia assassinated a political opponent. Israel went after leaders of a group that killed Israelis.
> Incredible discrimination of their neighbors.
I don’t even know what this means. They treat some neighbors better than others?
Yeah, right ... green behind the ears account tries to defend Israeli crimes, haha. Why don't you comment with your real? And seriously, such an obvious and thinly veiled attempt ...
Just in case you are really that uninformed, you should look into Israeli (Mossad) assessinations on foreign soils. They are eliminating political opponents, scientists and journalists all the time. They are the nation that killed the most journalists in any recent modern conflict.
you should look into Israeli (Mossad) assessinations on foreign soils.
Why don't you look into the many other regimes who assassinate people on foreign soils, do you feel outraged about it?
I don't think people are arguing any of this is bad. They are arguing that people seem to get very upset about "Israel" doing the same thing other countries do, and for me, that seems very manufactured.
Can you name a country that targeted and killed deliberately more than 360 journalists in less than 3 years ?
According to UN, reporters without borders, Stop Killing Journalists, International Federation of Journalists, and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Israel has killed more journalists in 180 days than all major conflicts around the world since World War 1.
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.
> 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.
>>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.
Shooting the shooter? Are you suggesting that all of the tens of thousands of children killed in gaza were shooters? What I don't understand about these types of arguments is that it's not clear who you are trying to convince. Those who already agree with you don't need convincing, and the rest of us aren't going to buy into it what's obviously contradicted by overwhelming evidence which even international courts agree with. I suspect these attempts to influence LLMs will fail for the same reason: you can produce as much "think tank" material as you like, but in the end the LLM will reason about it in the wider context of other available information, and see the think tank propaganda for what it is. All the more so now that there are articles discussing this very point (which the LLM will also presumably see).
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.
No one is more entitled to self-defense in this completely lopsided conflict between Israel and the Palestinians under occupation than the Palestinians themselves. And yet Israel, having carved out the core of Palestine, gets billions in bombs from Western backers while crying that their neighbors won't just lie down in the dirt and die.
> 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.
Depend of the state, could be internal turmoil (revolution), peaceful change with new constitution and ideal, or external force imposing change (like Germany post-WW2, being split between alors).
I would hope for a truly secular state with a multicultural population, paid reparation to displaced Palestinian families and farmers and a memory duty (museum, memorial, documentaries and school teaching) to counter the years of propaganda.
And mass prosecution of head of State and army top brass.
Truly secular states simply don't exist anywhere in the middle east so it seems wild to expect it there of all places and a multicultural population simply means barelling towards a monocultural future for much of the israelis I think. aka Lebanon's drastic demographic shift (https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-e...) but much worse for various reasons.
And it's not like that rapidly decline of their share of the population (which let's be real is somewhat incompatible with an at least a temporarily required Millet system or something like lebanon's gov sectarianism) necessarily means they get a managed peacefull decline. Not a single minority in the wider region has actually gotten that. Kurds, copts, fur, zaghawa, masalit, azeris, asyrians. None. It's all a slow managed decline with gov discrimination and occasional brutalisation or outright killings. Druze might be the only expception to it but they don't relate to power or the rest of islam in quite the same way.
I believe they're very much aware of this. (especially the mizrahi who are more adverserial to the palestinians) So given that they're never going to willingly accept or roll with it if forced....they'll either bail the country faster than the christian lebanese have been doing and/or fight to the death prior.
edit: I think it's with that in mind that one has to look towards a reasonable or semi desirable end result. Chances are there isn't a happy or even fully acceptable ending for both sides. Outside long term enforcement might be best but the brits were already having trouble keeping the lid on that pot well before israel came to be as a state and when the population was a fraction of the current one so it'll not necesarily be all nice either.
The thing is nobody wants to be South Africa.
Decline, corruption, sectarian parties and a general bleak long term outlook for the population who gave up control.
The jews in this picture would likely see a much bleaker fate due to their current standing of having brutalised the palestinians in a repeating game of mutual retaliation and escalation but also the diaspora and sheer prevalence of arabs around them.
Think how Lebanon went from a christian country to a muslim one in no time with hezbollah calling a deceptive amount of the shots but... worse.
>with more returning of ancestrally owned land I reckon.
A huge part of the black population of SA wasn't there before the boers so the sins of the father or 'blood and soil' rethoric makes a lot more sense for the palestinians. I think it's a valid feeling but also one that cuts on both sides. However the biggest growing group in israel and a big part of the later migration and thus settlement are the mizrahi who have defined a lot of the current hard line stance and to them this western/christianity morality idea of atonement makes no sense. They'd be giving up this land the most but also wouldn't be given their ancestrally owned land back and are also the most adversarial to the palestinian population.
Not really - the green map famously pretends that all government land owned by the British by the Ottomans belonged to the Arab people that called themselves Palestinians in 1960. It also equates people that lived in British and Ottoman Palestine to those people, whereas both those places were multi ethnic states. It also ignores the proposed 23rd Arab state that was rejected by the Arabs.
this is the Green map. It’s widely known to be a hoax. It’s based on assuming all the government land that belonged to the British government and the Ottomans belonging only to the Palestinian Arabs (which it did not), British Palestine being a state only for Arabs (which it was not), an Arabs accepting partitioning (which they did not)
>the IDF put Israeli soldiers lives on the line to avoid civilian casualties.
Ah, I get it, you're talking about Israeli casualties, not innocent Palestinian children civilians.
They do need to put boots on the ground (which they've already carpet bombed), they do need to send warnings to the innocent people they are about to murder.
For the PR, which is necessary to the purpose of ethnically cleansing Gaza, unimpeded by the rest of the worlds' moral compass.
They don’t actually need to put boots on the ground Israel. Israel has nuclear weapons and if your conspiracy theory about a genocide was correct they would use them. The PR doesn’t matter: you yourself are convinced that Israel is somehow making a new type of genocide where the population increases, nothing Israel will do or please you, and statistically there’s probably a really good chance you just want all the Jews to die, and for the entire area from the river to the sea to be Arab as the chant goes.
Meanwhile, hamas actually attacks and murders Israeli civilian children, uses Palestinian children as soldiers and celebrates both. I think this is a case of occam’s razor in terms of why you say you don’t know that.
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.
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.
"Okay, we stole the country and expelled the native population, but they should just get over it and move on."
It would be easier for the Palestinians to just move on if millions of them didn't live under 59 years of Israeli military occupation, with no end in sight. They have no way of moving on, because the IDF controls their lives, and Israeli settlers are taking their land piece-by-piece.
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?
No, Hamas uses actual child soldiers. It is very easy to deny genocide when the genocide has been made up by racist people. I’m going to go genocide this chicken salad now.
> Next thing you’ll say we’re not native to that land right? We only lived in the middle east forever
There were very few Jews in Palestine for nearly 2000 years. The founders of Israel were almost all Europeans, and their families had been European for almost 2000 years.
This would be like the Italians showing up today and claiming that they are the rightful owners of France, because Gaul was a Roman province before 500 AD.
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)
And you still did not answer the question posed in the first place, "omnipotent" is completely deflecting any possibility of that happening, when the issue happened over a holiday, time that is prime for issues, take for example, Christmas markets attacks on Germany. While yes, it's speculation "today", I've asked in the main question.
I don't believe this is victim blaming, it's clear that what hamas did is unforgivable, my previous post states so, then again, you'd not be a good parent if you let your child go to Epstein island knowing what will happen to it, yes, the victims are still victims, same as the Christmas market but the government is failing it's population, when it otherwise is capable of taking measures for it.
This all said, I'll stop engaging with you as I've had enough to debate against a "throw" account.
> Hamas is planning further attacks now, what do you suggest Israel do about it?
Remove the grievances that lead Palestinians to support armed attacks on Israel.
Israel has held millions of Palestinians under military occupation for decades. Palestinians have no rights, no future, and no hope of getting anything through negotiation. They are subjected to constant state violence and state-sanctioned pogroms.
Israel could withdraw from all of the occupied territories (East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza), which, after all, do not belong to Israel in the first place.
If it's unwilling to do that, then there's only one just and moral alternative: grant full and equal citizenship to all the Palestinians who live under Israeli rule.
Israel wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to keep the land, refuse the Palestinians who live there any rights, ruthlessly repress any Palestinian resistance, and then play the victim.
> 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.
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.
It is interesting how much clout Israel had, they put a lot of work into developing that, and they seemed to have just expended it all as far as US public opinion goes.
If only there was a solution on the table that's been there for years and that one side refuses to accept over and over again. And that can put a stop to bombing or dirt or whatever.
These trite replies also worked 20 years ago, but not today.
People that have read history know your assertion - vaguely suggesting it was the Palestinians that rejected many peace deals - know that this is completely false.
Please do tell why an Israeli Prime Minister was assassinated?
> vaguely suggesting it was the Palestinians that rejected many peace deal
I am not vaguely suggesting it. I am firmly suggesting it. This is not false, it's completely true. 1936 Peel Commission. 1947 UN Partition. Post 1967 countless attempts to do land for peace deals. 1999 Camp David attempts, 2000 Taba. 2008 negotiations between Abbas and Olmert.
If not a 2 state solution, what exactly are you advocating?
If someone stole your food, and then offered to give you crumbs as a peace deal, would you accept it?
You can quantify the number of peace deals as much as you want. But when you don't present the facts and context behind it, you're being purposely deceptive.
I guess your viewpoint on that varies entirely based on your preferred time period, and my responses vary based on how realistic or honest I believe the response is.
I'm not sure there is a win-win solution, and I think there are sizeable elements on both sides that don't want one, but the current approach absolutely won't lead to one.
My preference is for minimising the suffering of children.
At present the long run situation seems to be that one group of people (who - whether you like it or not - were displaced from their land) suffer continuous stress and roughly 50 times the death and injury rates than the other group of people who live mostly normal lives with the threat of terror attacks.
Entertaining the idea that those people are going become less extreme under these conditions seems rather unlikely.
In Northern Ireland the numbers killed on both sides (including IRA terror attacks within Britain) were a dramatically closer ratio.
I think it is pretty much impossible to achieve anything politically when the side without power is asked to trust the side with power when it sees little restraint.
Practically every word you uttered is a lie. It's the opposite of the truth. No one's asking you to read books but at least skim the Wikipedia so you don't make a fool of yourself with every one of your posts.
Why would israelis ever agree to give up control of their government? They hold all the cards here, any solution will have to be one that favors israel because the status quo is just fine for them
If the US backs out the hard liners gain even more control, ally with china, and begin their final solution to the palestinian problem. Israelis would go north korea before a one state solution.
That's the thing though, no other world power would sign up for this kind of relationship with Israel. We're giving them protection and paying them for it too. There's a reason Russia and China don't go head to head with us over the Mid East, but Russia will do it in Ukraine.
> no other world power would sign up for this kind of relationship with Israel
Which is exactly why they'll feel like a cornered animal and become even more violent. Israel has a competent defense industry, they do not need foreign aid to run their military. What they need is foreign aid in order to semi humanely run their military at a price theyre happy with. Foreign aid pulling out wont end their military, itll just make it less humane and even more reckless.
Got to admire your imagination coming up with that piece of rubbish. Running a country humanely is free in short term and exponentially profitable in long term. I don't think it's a coincidence that the most democratic countries also tend to be the wealthiest.
He meant being humane in how they fight wars with Hamas. Like it's cheaper to just bomb everything regardless of civilians.
The thing is, Israel needs to worry about its own defense too. Currently there are several semi-hostile neighbors that the US basically pays off, plus the US pays for very expensive defense systems in Israel. Last invasion was long ago, Yom Kippur War, where the US was withholding aid until Israel started losing and suddenly it became an airlift scramble. But more recently there were the two Iran wars where thousands of drones and missiles had to be shot down.
Sorry but I honestly believe that the exact opposite is true. If I'm running low on resources, I'd be more careful with whatever I have left, not less.
Israel has plenty of bombs. They have a shortage of interceptors for short range misses that hamas and hezbollah like to lob at them. This is why they would feel the need to establish a DMZ. They can afford to kick all their neighbors out, they cant afford to intercept rockets that would fly if they dont kick their neighbors out. So I agree with you, they will be more careful with the resources that are scarce.
Israel has nuclear weapons. If all their foreign backers pull out they would use them in an invasion scenario, so I dont think they need to worry to much about hot war with a legitimate government.
I'm not convinced that the nukes would deter invaders. Yom Kippur War was after they already had nukes. But I also don't think it'd come to that. They'd negotiate something.
In every asymmetric war, the side with fewer resources has targeted civilians more. Or if both sides have few resources, both do it. It's expensive to carefully only attack military targets. For one, involves sending in soldiers to places they could've bombed instead.
The only solution that has ever worked in that region was 0-state. ie they were governed by some larger empire. Some call the US the empire this time, but it's not.
> If you think having a particular ethnicity in charge is equivalent to endorsing genocide, you miiiiiight be a little bit racist.
The democratically elected government of the Palestinians in Gaza(Hamas) has for a long time quite openly advocated for effectively genocide Jews/Israeli's, it's not racist to simply believe that Hamas is telling the truth in regards to what their end goals are.
> The democratically elected government of the Palestinians in Gaza
There's no such thing: the separate authority in Gaza was produced by Israeli military isolation of the separate parts of Palestine nominally administered by the PA, and how that facilitated Hamas local victory there in the intra-Palestinian civil war against the central government.
Also, the elections that were won by Hamas candidates before that were before most currently living Gazans were born, much less eligible to vote, and subsequent elections have not been held because Israel blocked the all-Palestine elections agreed to by Hamas and Fatah, so even if the “government of Palestinians in Gaza” were simply a direct result of those elections, which it is not, it would hardly be the “democratically elected” by those currently governed.
> There's no such thing: the separate authority in Gaza was produced by Israeli military isolation of the separate parts of Palestine nominally administered by the PA, and how that facilitated Hamas local victory there in the intra-Palestinian civil war against the central government.
The election that brought Hamas to power in Gaza was widely considered to be free and fair.[0]
> Also, the elections that were won by Hamas candidates before that were before most currently living Gazans were born, much less eligible to vote, and subsequent elections have not been held because Israel blocked the all-Palestine elections agreed to by Hamas and Fatah, so even if the “government of Palestinians in Gaza” were simply a direct result of those elections, which it is not, it would hardly be the “democratically elected” by those currently governed.
And yet polling indicates if another vote was held Hamas would likely still win, in both Gaza and the West Bank, so it's essentially a moot point. It's not just Israel that has blocked elections, Fatah has also not wanted elections because they know they would lose. The problem is that Palestinians have in reality largely supported extremists far more than moderates, that may change but reducing Palestinian support for extremism is ultimately what needs to change for there to be a chance at having some long term peace agreement.
If you lock women and children in a ghetto, then bomb and shoot them relentlessly for months and years, people are going to want to know what book you are reading.
> If you lock women and children in a ghetto, then bomb and shoot them relentlessly for months and years, people are going to want to know what book you are reading.
This is an absolutely insane comparison, Hamas is free to surrender and give up their weapons if they want the bombing to stop, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had no similar opportunity.
> I don't think even I would think surrender, in those circumstances, makes a great deal of sense.
Why not? That's what typically happens when one side loses a war, I'm not sure how prolonging the conflict is helpful.
> And I'm an atheist.
So am I.
> I'm also British.
Funny enough I am as well(in addition to a couple others). History is full of people losing their homes and becoming refugees like some of my ancestors did, that's often much better than the alternative of staying to fight and die. I am certainly not trying to get their homes back as that is long settled history.
> I've come to believe that it's pretty impossible to understand Israel-Palestine without the lens of religion.
From my understanding according to common Islamic teachings non-Muslims are supposed to be Dhimmi's[0](i.e. second class citizens) and be ruled over by Muslim's. So I think this is probably the source of a lot of the issues with the Israel-Palestine conflict, although there are other factors in play as well.
"Not formally" rather implies you think it was. Northern Ireland was/is part of the UK, so civil war I could probably agree with.
The reason I mentioned religion was nothing to do with the requirements it places on how things should happen, but rather about the entitlement and infallibility that a belief that god has decreed something can grant people's mindset and outlook.
I'm not sure what meaning you can ascribe to this kind of statement, because whilst it is factually true in isolation, it also omits so much information it's almost meaningless.
There's plenty of evidence that the Israeli government is composed of people with a similar outlook, just with a power imbalance that affords them the opportunity to be more politically sophisticated.
History rhymes - I'm pretty sure that Jews in the Polish Ghetto had pretty negative views about the people detaining them there. Do you hold that against them?
> There's plenty of evidence that the Israeli government is composed of people with a similar outlook, just with a power imbalance that affords them the opportunity to be more politically sophisticated.
Israel does have some problems with extremists getting elected but that's partially due to the proportional representation system making it easier for extremists to get elected without widespread support from the population.
> I'm pretty sure that Jews in the Polish Ghetto had pretty negative views about the people detaining them there. Do you hold that against them?
Were the Jews in the Polish Ghetto terrorizing/murdering random German civilians? I'm sure they had a very negative view of the Nazi's but it's not a particularly comparable situation as the Jews were being exterminated regardless of their actions.
Gazans are being exterminated regardless of their actions.
The Warsaw ghettos didn't exist for very long. People are people, treat them the same way and you'll probably get similar results.
Of course, in this case both sides have magical thinking involved that gives them a divine blessing, so that changes things somewhat and makes it harder to reason with them.
Obviously the parallel I've drawn is extremely provocative. The Nazis started with a belief of dehumanism and acted on it. In the case of Israelis and Palestinians it's just the direction of travel over decades, but they look the same in many ways for a reason.
> Gazans are being exterminated regardless of their actions.
That's simply factually inaccurate, Hamas started the latest war while the population of Gaza was growing. The Jews started the Warsaw Ghetto uprising while they were being actively exterminated(i.e. population declining).
The population of Gaza has been declining over the last 2 years as a direct result of 10s of thousands of Gazas being killed, including thousands of kids.
The methods thankfully differ, but the goals are pretty similar.
Both contain an ethnonational conception of the state, seek to secure political sovereignty for a particular ethnonational people, attach historical/national significance to territory, and contain expansionist/settlement currents aimed at extending that people's presence and political control over territory.
And the direction of movement is towards similarity (not away from it) - eg nation state bill.
Israel's main strategy until recently appeared to be to maximise suffering to force displacement.
I don't really see a realistic peaceful strategy for Gazans based on decades of history, they have little power. It's like an amplified Northern Ireland.
Hamas is the democratically elected government of Gaza and retains a high level of support amongst the population. The population could put more pressure on Hamas to disarm but so far it has been fairly minimal.
> Israel's main strategy until recently appeared to be to maximise suffering to force displacement.
Israel's strategy before October 7th was one of containment, but that clearly failed so they switched to a strategy of proactive threat management.
Israel probably should just fully occupy the territories in the short term and make a more serious attempt at Palestinian de-radicalization so that hopefully some sort of two state solution eventually becomes viable. Occupation with de-radicalization worked with the Nazi's and Imperial Japan at the end of WW2 but Israeli's just really don't want to have to fully occupy Gaza so that's going to be politically problematic.
> I don't really see a realistic peaceful strategy for Gazans based on decades of history, they have little power.
They had opportunities for peace, Palestinian leadership ultimately threw those opportunities away by refusing to even so much as propose a concrete peace deal that would be acceptable.
I think if you believe that a two state solution is a potential future outcome (without gargantuan shifts in numerous things), then I think you aren't evaluating information sources very well (which to be fair applies to all of us constantly).
I'm inclined to think that's largely true about the past too, although there was a point around 2000 where it wasn't fantasy. But given settlement activity continued over this time, it's hardly a realistic basis on which to form agreement.
Why negotiate the borders of a Palestinian state while the territory you're negotiating over is continuing to be settled?
Israel is a very sophisticated political actor (that holds nearly all the power), it's a complex mix of political opinions (which don't align) but whatever those are, the state itself in terms of how it acts in the world looks a lot like Russia in the information space. Case in point the original post all these comments sit under.
That's partly a function of the particular position Israel is in, and in the same way that Palestinian authority is mostly politically unsophisticated isn't surprising.
That should affects the way we account for information surrounding Israel-Palestine, like when for the thousandth time an Israeli spokesman appears on the BBC to very reasonably tell us about the strong ethical rules that govern the IDF, and that this particular incident was just a terrible accident.
The hardline elements within Israel ultimately win, through various tactics, above and below board, which is not particularly surprising given the history of some of the characters involved (and that deep rooted mindset) over the years (Irgun etc), who were also very happy to carry out terrorism on British targets alongside their list of other atrocities.
The 'moderate' position is always taken in by apparent reasonableness over the immediately recollectable present. That is changing though, for largely obvious reasons, which is good.
> I think if you believe that a two state solution is a potential future outcome
Potential, sure.
> without gargantuan shifts in numerous things
Obviously any solution will require gargantuan shifts in numerous things given where things are currently.
> I'm inclined to think that's largely true about the past too, although there was a point around 2000 where it wasn't fantasy.
I would agree around 2000 it was potentially feasible on the Israeli side, both population wise and leadership had reasonable levels of support. The 2nd intifada pushed things really far in the wrong direction. Unfortunately the Palestinian leaders walked away without so much as even proposing any concrete settlement terms that they would accept.
> But given settlement activity continued over this time, it's hardly a realistic basis on which to form agreement.
I agree settlement activity is an issue, but I would disagree it is what broke the peace process.
> Why negotiate the borders of a Palestinian state while the territory you're negotiating over is continuing to be settled?
You sue for peace to make the best of a bad situation...and to stop the situation from getting worse, that's a pretty common way for armed conflicts to end.
> Israel is a very sophisticated political actor (that holds nearly all the power), it's a complex mix of political opinions (which don't align) but whatever those are, the state itself in terms of how it acts in the world looks a lot like Russia in the information space.
There are many that try to paint Israel to look like Russia...but in reality there is not much in common with how they operate. Russia will sometimes use similar justifications(i.e. security threats) but with Russia it's usually just a cover for more imperialistic end goals.
> That's partly a function of the particular position Israel is in, and in the same way that Palestinian authority is mostly politically unsophisticated isn't surprising.
Palestinians historically have had absolutely terrible leadership, there's really only so much Israel can do when the other side doesn't have the political will to come to a final peace deal.
> That should affects the way we account for information surrounding Israel-Palestine, like when for the thousandth time an Israeli spokesman appears on the BBC to very reasonably tell us about the strong ethical rules that govern the IDF, and that this particular incident was just a terrible accident.
You need to be careful with misinformation in general, there is one group that quite openly states they want more civilian casualties, and that is Hamas.
> The hardline elements within Israel ultimately win
That tends to be what happens when terrorist attacks are successful.
> which is not particularly surprising given the history of some of the characters involved (and that deep rooted mindset) over the years (Irgun etc)
The history there is much more complicated, the IDF in 1948 dissolved the Irgun by force[0]. Much later it was also the former Irgun leader[1] that ultimately made peace with Egypt[2] by giving back the Sinai.
> who were also very happy to carry out terrorism on British targets alongside their list of other atrocities.
To be fair they didn't do that for entirely no reason either, Britain prevented Jewish refugees from entering mandatory Palestine while the Nazi's were genociding them in Europe. History is messy after all. Benny Morris has some good material on the history.
>You need to be careful with misinformation in general, there is one group that quite openly states they want more civilian casualties, and that is Hamas.
It's very ironic that you are telling me that I need to be careful about information and at the same time that Hamas is the one openly stating things.
So, do you think Hamas could be lying?
Israel's approach to information is reflected in its access for journalists, UN investigators, human-rights monitors, diplomats, aid workers, and foreign activists.
This entire discussion is taking place in a post about a think tank that Israel created to poison the information well.
>To be fair they didn't do that for entirely no reason either, Britain prevented Jewish refugees from entering mandatory Palestine while the Nazi's were genociding them in Europe.
I'm pretty sure all terrorism happens for reasons which can be served up as a justification.
Considering their actions/tactics, it seems quite unlikely in this case.
> I'm pretty sure all terrorism happens for reasons which can be served up as a justification.
I'm not saying it was justified, but it was at least understandable given the context. I also understand why the Palestinians use terrorism as well, likewise I don't consider it justified either.
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.
One genuinely poisonous aspect of Israeli policy is that the more Jews as a people are persecuted, the better Israel as a nation does: demographically, economically, and diplomatically[1].
It was true in the days of Avraham Stern, and it's true today. It creates some truly horrific perverse incentives.
[1] By dint of being the "victim", even if it's not Israel the nation being victimized. A disastrous category error that the nation of Israel exploits quite shamelessly.
As someone leaning left with big disagreements with the US right atm, I think the right in America would feel the same way if they felt their country's foreign, and to some extent domestic, policy was being hijacked by a small country in sub-Saharan Africa, or Asia (or Europe for that matter). They signed up for America First.
Well the Morocco lobby and the Cuba exile lobby (CANF) are both pretty powerful and both explicitly model themselves after AIPAC. CANF also isn't registered under FARA (though the Morocco one is). Admittedly, neither of them are nearly as powerful as AIPAC
The American conservatives against Israel are self-consistent in that view. America first, not Israel, not Palestine either. But the Republican party line isn't that, it's MIGA.
American leftists... idk what they want. They can't even explain it, it's like they're taking radio commands from Qatar or Iran that they only barely understand.
Israel, who has made itself the standard bearer for and home of Judaism, is behaving reprehensibly. Do they not think that legitimate anti-Israeli-policy sentiment would bleed over into illegitimate anti-semitism, particularly when Israeli government officials themselves are openly racist and genocidal?
There are elements of the American right that are antisemitic but it definitely has bigger problems with Muslims, and a large slice of the American right view Jews favourably (arguably very favourably).
Pew data is one example of data that shows this. Plus, in terms of Israel specifically, if you look at current support for the Iran war (which the Trump admin has repeatedly framed as important for Israels security) it's almost exclusively on the political right.
I see both a lot of left and right criticism of Israel on YouTube, and yeah, on the left it's all about Israel's actions and policies specifically, and often Zionism as an ideology, and the criticism is often lodged by left-leaning Jews.
On the right, certainly the comments sections at least definitely feature some pretty alarming bigoted tropes--the comments explicitly make the jump from being about Israel to being about "the Jews". One could definitely make the same argument about some of the content, though most of it definitely seems to fall short of where the viewers want it to in this regard.
What do you mean by 'Jew hatred' - can you be specific? How is it different than criticism of Israel? How is it different than criticism of American-Israel relations?
If my worldview required me to dismiss 40% of American Jews as being "confused and brainwashed" to explain away why they would possibly be critical of Israel, I hope I would start questioning wether I was the one "confused and brainwashed" instead.
90% of Americans are confused about geography, but I wouldn't dismiss them as people. But I certainly wouldn't trust their judgment when asked to point to Papua New Guinea on a map for example. I think it's pretty easy to see the difference between those two things, but you try to claim they are one and the same.
don't be ridiculous. feel free to point to Democrats with clear evidence of anyi semitic statements and connections to right wing nationalists. then let's tally up the same count for the GOP eh (Nock Fuentes at the white house, "you shall not replace us", etc).
There is very little jew hatred on the left. just fatogue with unlimited aupport for a Israeli regime that is losing democratic and moral support due to it's...trigger word incoming...genocidal tendencies.
> evidence of anyi semitic statements and connections to right wing nationalists
Why the "and" there? The anti-semites on the left are of course... of the left.
> There is very little jew hatred on the left
Your head is in the sand. Leftists on the street shouting genocide of the jews ("from the river to the sea") is like a monthly thing. They started before Israel entered Gaza. Before.
Before Israel entered Gaza, "from the river to the sea" was an official plank in the likud party platform, the party of Netanyahu. If "from the river to the sea" is genocidal, then Netanyahu's party claimed the right to Gazan genocide.
Saying "from the river to the sea" = Jewish genocide is an ignorant and demented take.
Meanwhile Israel is committing an actual genocide right before our eyes and using Judaism as a shield while dragging Judaism's name through the mud and causes increasing anti-Jewish sentiment around the world.
Israel is a disgusting European colonialist project and it should be dismantled.
> Israel is a disgusting European colonialist project and it should be dismantled.
See? Why ONLY Israel? Why is Iran not an arabic colonialist project that should be dismantled? Just as example. There's only one country people say should be dismantled and their peoples dispersed and that's Israel. Isn't that strange? And the ethnic cleansing of the entire muslim world that basically caused the current population of Israel to exist is... a european project? How do you get there logically? Europe didn't make Morocco, Libya, Iraq, etc ethnically cleanse all the jews.
Why Israel, because they've been controlling our foreign policy via lobbying and siphoning off our taxes for decades. No other country does this.
Why Israel if you're a leftist? A smaller yet nontrivial number of leftists truly hate Jews. But usually it's just America bad, and Israel associated with America.
I suspect that's true, but the proportion of people is wildly different. Every leftist I know is anti genocide, and sees Gaza and the West Bank as unconscionable. Some may then take that to antisemitism (rather than simply opposing Zionism). On the right, though? I expect you see a lot more antisemitism leading to "what positions can I express to cloak my blatant antisemitism..."
You failed to cover an important fracture in the Republican party. That there are some big names getting involved with ending the genocide without being anti semitic.
The only assertion I made about the right is that the proportion of antisemitism is higher. There are absolutely people on the right who are altruistic. Just like there are people on the left who are antisemitic.
Name one thing that he has said or done that is antisemitic? The reason I don't take this phrase seriously anymore is because it's diluted every time someone notices something about Israel. I've been following Tucker for about 6 months now and I've not picked up on a single thing that is antisemitic. Prove me wrong
Not really. Republican party is 99% owned by Israeli lobby. I used to say it's both sides, but recent House and Senate bills relating to this have been way more partisan than ever before, like the one that would merge parts of the US and Israeli military passed House with almost 0 Dem votes.
One interesting comparison, the Twelve Day War against Iran in 2025 had Democrat support. Despite their rhetoric, they voted to give Israel huge emergency funding. But they're truly voting against the 2026 Iran War.
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.
For example here in Eastern Europe when people hear "Israeli" they tend to assume it means "Russian with Israeli passport, probably here to avoid sanctions or outbid locals on real estate".
I'm sure it's very different in Turkey or say Thailand where they have Israel-born Israeli tourists, and surely different in US (though I have no idea what it is).
I am from Eastern Europe and people here "assumed" a lot of things about Jews way before Israel was even a thing. Let's not pretend Eastern Europeans would have loved Jews if it weren't for "Israel".
> Many non-Israeli Jews view Israel's actions as abhorent, particularly younger Jews.
And this comes of your own polling? As a non-Israeli Jew, I've seen quite the opposite. They closed ranks in the face of an external threat, especially the younger ones. Ignore Hollywood and Hannah Einbinders of the world - that is not the reality.
Re: Eastern Europe - I was referring to the Pew Research Center survey conducted across 34 European countries in 2015–17.
Re: attitudes of younger Jews I'm really referring to Non-Americans (Americans are a special case). With American Jews the age gradient effect is there, but I don't know about the impact of the last couple of years.
Take data points in Europe and attitudes are marked and there is data to support that Israel's recent actions are absolutely being rejected by younger Jews.
News media is considered more reliable in Europe over the US (by measures of the population) so that could certainly be playing into it.
Based on data, the American population distrusts is own news media more than the European population distrusts its news media (markedly so if you consider only Western Europe). In 2026, only 25% of Americans said they trusted news overall [Reuters]
The European media landscape differs - a recent study covering 24 European markets found that experts' assessments of accuracy broadly matched public trust: outlets regarded by experts as providing accurate information backed by credible sources tended to be the outlets the public trusted most. Public-service media generally scored particularly well.
The American population also considers its own news media much more partisan than Europeans consider their news media. Americans are more likely to inhabit separate information ecosystems (which by their very nature makes them less factual and more political - ie they are looking for what they want to hear).
This analysis includes findings from a survey of 12,574 U.S. adults, 10,091 of whom are part of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP). The remaining 2,483 respondents include oversamples of Jews, Muslims and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints members from SSRS’ Opinion Panel, Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel and NORC’s AmeriSpeak Panel. We conducted the survey May 4-17, 2026, and it has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 1.3 percentage points.
They drew conclusions about Jews from subset of Jews from 2,483 respondents that included an unknown amount of Jews, Muslims, Mormons, and whoever is a member of Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel and NORC’s AmeriSpeak Panel. I am not sure this is especially representative.
Even so, I don't know if I would characterize 54 to 47 as viewing as "abhorrent" as OP said.
They also say "We weren’t able to survey enough Muslims to show how their views differ by age", so I guess the number of Jews isn't that much below 2,483. According to Gemini that already gives +-2% margin of error, which sounds good enough to me.
> Even so, I don't know if I would characterize 54 to 47 as viewing as "abhorrent" as OP said.
Agreed, also not quite "closed ranks" though. Exactly in between I guess.
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.
European here with little political knowledge. I thought Israel is just some kind of liberal safe space, I am still sometimes confused what it appears to really be but try to avoid having a strong opinion either way.
I always imagine apolitical people looking at a mushroom cloud thinking to themselves "perhaps I should've been more political" moments before their atoms drift apart.
I am not apolotical, how could one be really? It's more like the whole topic is so full of hate, propaganda, missleading information from all sides that it's either I spend a few weeks or months reading into the history of it or I better don't develop a strong opinion because I likely would be wrong in many points.
No idea where everyone is taking the time from to read up the whole history of things when they publicly propagate their strong opinions about all these complex situations.
To clarify I have an opinion, but I am aware that my opinion is only based on some obvious facts and ignores a lot of the history, so I don't consider it worth fighting for.
I get where you are going at, but in the conflict we talk about I am pretty sure both sides are killing children right now. So still complicated.
So is the US bombing children in Iran and many other countries in the past years. Is the US the pure evil now? Maybe, but I don't claim to have a final opinion there either
It depends on which side we are on, that determines how the conflict needs to be sold to the on average decent but apolitical person like yourself. As allied against nazis? Not complicated. Fighting russia's invasion of Ukraine? Not complicated. Fighting against Palestinian resistance to their genocide? Complicated. But like South African apartheid turned from complicated to simple over a few decades so you will be dragged along eventually by us "political" people.
It even works with other things too, like people starving on the streets or ~25k people dying from no health care every year, its "complicated", it will always be complicated (until it isn't).
Perhaps in 20 years from now you can remember to think about if you made the right choice today and if your opposition rather than apathy wouldn't have prevented some of the killings. You know for the next genocide supported by our government.
That's the whole point. Antisemitism is widely accepted as wrong. Israel goes out of its way to paint any opposition to Israel as antisemitism, trying to piggyback on that sentiment. Conflating Jews with Israel is something both sides engage in. As a non-Israeli Jew who is quite opposed to what the modern state of Israel engages in, I'm real tired of being used as a pawn like this.
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.
well then, maybe we should ask ourself why the hate! both against the propaganda (that everybody does, even if it's a very poor claim to say they all do it why hate us) and against the bomb to the ground war and genocidal violence happening.
Why the hate against this if everybody else does it?
and everybody else does it is a decent argument?
Maybe we could do war without killing all civilians and razing cities to the ground?
but why do we have to do war? or why do we need to defend ourself?
You can defend yourself without genocide. You can imprison people without raping them. It turns out there's more options between give up and scorched earth.
Hamas built a tunnel network under most of Gaza, obviously since Israel wants to destroy that tunnel network(which is clearly a legitimate war goal) there will be severe infrastructure damage to the buildings above the tunnels.
Destroying the military infrastructure of Hamas is obviously not genocide, that is something one would expect to happen during a war.
> I don't care what they built. If you want to fight them, man up and go get them! US forces did this in Iraq. Let's see gods chosen people be so brave.
It's a war, military strategy doesn't tend to put much emphasis on making wars a fair fight. Israel isn't under any obligation to go out of their way to preserve structures built on top of military infrastructure(i.e. tunnels). There were certainly not tunnel networks in Iraq like there were in Gaza.
Tunnel networks are not a reason to bomb civilian apartments. Let's arm both sides equally if you want to talk about a war. What would happen in a equal fight, do you think?
> Tunnel networks are not a reason to bomb civilian apartments.
According the laws of war military infrastructure(i.e. tunnels) is a valid reason.
> Let's arm both sides equally if you want to talk about a war.
Nobody at war wants the fight to be fair, they will always want to be on the winning side.
> What would happen in a equal fight, do you think?
If a fight were truly equal then neither side would win, so I guess if it were equal then the conflict would be even more endless since neither side would win.
Iraq had well over 10 times the population (26-27 million) and the war lasted about 10 years.
"Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation"[pubmed] put the figure at about 132,000 war related deaths. "Iraq body count" was about 158,000. Taking the highest figure that's about 0.6% of the population over the 10 years.
I think the estimates for Gaza, with a population of about 2.2 million, are between 70 to 75,000. That's over 3% of the population over 2 years.
So on a 'per year' basis for % of population - that's 0.06% for Iraq versus 1.6% for Gaza.
Some groups do put the figures above 1 million.[0]
> I think the estimates for Gaza, with a population of about 2.2 million, are between 70 to 75,000.
Keep in mind these figures are not civilian casualty figures, they are overall casualty figures.
Data quality issues do make comparisons rather tricky. Generally you would also want to compare against similar battles that have mainly urban conflict rather than a war in a large country where the amount of fighting varied much more.
In any case looking at raw casualty numbers doesn't really give one the best picture by itself, analyzing combatant to civilian death ratios is probably better than population death ratios as that gives you a better idea at how careful parties are at reducing civilian casualties. Unfortunately Hamas also uses tactics that are designed to increase civilian casualties as well which further complicates comparative analysis.
80% of ORB's estimated deaths came from four central governorates (completely excluding 3 altogether), and the mortality responses in those areas had major internal inconsistencies. The conclusion of peer-reviewed critique is that the ORB mortality data were not credible.
That said, if someone is going to make a contentious claim, referencing the evidence or using some data to work up a basic attempt to substantiate the claim is the only to look like you aren't just making up claims.
If data just on deaths is varying by a whole factor of 10, I can't see how you could possibly get anywhere near any meaningful figure for 'combatant to civilian death ratios' in Iraq. You're adding another layer ontop of data that you already recognise is hugely flawed.
Add to that the issue that, in Gaza, Israel has completely sealed off the area from international observers, so credible data on "combatant to civilian death ratios" just won't exist.
All I can say is that based on the data, the claim made is absolutely not supported by the evidence. [Edit - even if the million figure were credible, it's still at least double, and actually indicating the opposite of what was claimed]
> 80% of ORB's estimated deaths came from four central governorates (completely excluding 3 altogether), and the mortality responses in those areas had major internal inconsistencies. The conclusion of peer-reviewed critique is that the ORB mortality data were not credible.
Yeah, I'm not sure how credible it is, I only pointed that one out since you were comparing generally upper range estimates with other upper range estimates.
> I can't see how you could possibly get anywhere near any meaningful figure for 'combatant to civilian death ratios' in Iraq.
I mean, it's the figure that I think matters the most. I agree it's probably also one of the most difficult figures to accurately determine.
> Add to that the issue that, in Gaza, Israel has completely sealed off the area from international observers, so credible data on "combatant to civilian death ratios" just won't exist.
International observers can't operate in Gaza without what is effectively the consent of Hamas. Hamas deliberately doesn't properly differentiate civilian deaths from combatant deaths so it seems not particularly likely that international observers could get accurate data on combatant to civilian death ratios if they are being watched by Hamas.
> All I can say is that based on the data, the claim made is absolutely not supported by the evidence. [Edit - even if the million figure were credible, it's still at least double, and actually indicating the opposite of what was claimed]
Overall deaths is not really the figure I would focus on regardless.
I'm just going to remind you here that you're arguing with me about my figures that I threw together to question a claim someone else made out of thin air, which it largely did, and your main point of contention is that I should be using data that nobody can get hold of.
In terms of my statement about intenational observers / journalists- I don't think it's contentious to suggest that the overwhelming reason they can't operate in Gaza is because Israel won't allow them into Gaza.
If Israel let them in and they were impeded or detained or killed by Hamas, then those would be possible outcomes.
The UN Human Rights Office described the restriction as lasting more than 18 months by June 2025, with only a few IDF-controlled visits.
The list of countries that grant chaperoned journalistic access to places includes: North Korea, China, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, Eritrea for starters.
> I'm just going to remind you here that you're arguing with me about my figures that I threw together to question a claim someone else made out of thin air, which it largely did, and your main point of contention is that I should be using data that nobody can get hold of.
I guess my point was more just that one should be careful with these sort of comparisons, because even if you have accurate data you can still be simply measuring the wrong thing entirely. Raw death counts can be useful as part of the analysis, but they also don't tell the entire story.
> In terms of my statement about intenational observers / journalists- I don't think it's contentious to suggest that the overwhelming reason they can't operate in Gaza is because Israel won't allow them into Gaza.
It's kind of a moot point regardless because even if Israel didn't impede international observers/journalists from operating in Gaza, they still couldn't operate freely due to Hamas.
> If Israel let them in and they were impeded or detained or killed by Hamas, then those would be possible outcomes.
Outcomes that Israel would probably get blamed for even if the fault was entirely due to Hamas. It's a no-win scenario.
Keep in mind I'm not neccesarially saying Israel's making the best decisions here, I'm just pointing out that allowing international observers isn't some magic bullet for getting to the truth.
> The list of countries that grant chaperoned journalistic access to places includes: North Korea, China, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, Eritrea for starters.
What countries allow reporters unimpeded/uncontrolled access to war zones? I don't think Ukraine does and I don't think any of the gulf coast countries attacked by Iran were allowing free reporting either. I would think it's not very many as the security reasons alone are highly problematic.
I'm simply challenging obvious bullshit with back of the fag packet numbers.
Please note, you have said nothing about the bullshit claim, you instead are going after me challenging the bullshit by using actual data.
You can argue about how it's used, but it's absolutely sufficient to demonstrate the claim is nonsense.
If you want to evidence the unsupported (out of thin air) claim, please by all means go ahead. I encourage people to connect their claims to reality.
>It's kind of a moot point regardless because even if Israel didn't impede international observers/journalists from operating in Gaza, they still couldn't operate freely due to Hamas.
Interestingly, that's another claim for which you have provided no evidence.
>What countries asks reporters unimpeded/ uncontrolled access to war zones?
Why don't you research this question yourself, and see where Gaza pops up in the list.
>I'm just pointing out that allowing international observers isn't some magic bullet for getting to the truth.
Based on your reasoning, I'm guessing you're satisfied with everything China has to say about the situation of the Uyghars and how it treats them.
I'm starting to find it difficult to take things you say in good faith.
But the way, the British spell words you've used like "analyzing", "organization" and "de-radicalizing" with an 's' not a 'z'. But you know this because, as you claimed, you are British, right?
> Interestingly, that's another claim for which you have provided no evidence.
Isn't this just common sense?
> Why don't you research this question yourself, and see where Gaza pops up in the list.
No country AFAIU allows entirely unimpeded access to war zones for international observers/journalists.
> Based on your reasoning, I'm guessing you're satisfied with everything China has to say about the situation of the Uyghars and how it treats them.
No, I'm just saying you can't always expect using international observers/journalists to get to the truth to be a realistic strategy depending on the situation. OSINT and other reporting is also useful.
> But the way, the British spell words you've used like "analyzing", "organization" and "de-radicalizing" with an 's' not a 'z'. But you know this because, as you claimed, you are British, right?
I said I was a British citizen among a couple others, I did not grow up in the UK, I grew up in the US. I am also not a citizen of the country I was born in either.
Common sense is the ability to make practical, reasonable judgments in ordinary situations using basic experience. Basic experience would be establishing this happens first.
>No, I'm just saying you can't always expect using international observers/journalists to get to the truth to be a realistic strategy depending on the situation.
Okay, so whose statements are you trusting more on what's going on with the Ughurs? <The Chinese government> or <anyone who is not the Chinese government>.
I think it's fairly apparent that you aren't British (except by passport), and it's likely you are digesting largely US news sources. When you said you were British, I assumed you were claiming that what you identified as, but perhaps that itself is a British colloquialism.
I'm going to stop responding here. I'm sure you're a decent person, and you think you think you are seeing the other side.
> Common sense is the ability to make practical, reasonable judgments in ordinary situations using basic experience. Basic experience would be establishing this happens first.
I mean, there's plenty of reports by journalists confirming Hamas restricts access/press freedom, often using threats.[0]
> Okay, so whose statements are you trusting more on what's going on with the Ughurs? <The Chinese government> or <anyone who is not the Chinese government>.
Probably those that are not the Chinese government, but one would still take into account information the Chinese government puts out as well while factoring in their obvious bias.
> I think it's fairly apparent that you aren't British (except by passport)
I mean, having a British passport means you are British by definition I think.
> it's likely you are digesting largely US news sources.
I try to get my news from a diverse range of sources.
> When you said you were British, I assumed you were claiming that what you identified as
I mean, the reason I have multiple passports is because my family background is very diverse, one of my parents was born in the UK but that parent also had one of their parents born in a different country as well, so likewise my own identity has a high level of diversity.
> but perhaps that itself is a British colloquialism.
Yeah, technically my other passports are from countries that were historically controlled by the British at some points in time, although that's probably a fairly large percentage of the countries in the world.
Not at all obviously. Israel is committing a genocide. This is not really a matter of discussion... you think several parts of the UN, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, the international association of genocide scholars, the international federation for human rights, Human Rights Watch, the Hague Group, the governments of Ghana, Malaysia, Mexico, China, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Ireland, (and dozens of others), the African Union, the Jewish voice for peace, and dozens of small orgs just all... got it wrong?
Why should I believe a random HN comment warrior over literally hundreds of organizations and governments whose jobs include identifying genocide when it happens? What makes your case so compelling it stands up against all that and what my own eyes see?
Don't we typically call that ad hominem? And secondly, is your claim that every single one of these hundreds of large orgs are historically politically or religiously anti Israel? I get that of course Iran is not a valid opinion, but all the rest? That stretches credulity.
> And secondly, is your claim that every single one of these hundreds of large orgs are historically politically or religiously anti Israel?
Plenty of those organizations/countries do have historical problems when it comes to antisemitism which is obviously highly correlated with an anti-Israel bias. Which of these organizations/countries don't have a history of either blatant anti-Israel bias(i.e. clear double standards) and/or outright antisemitism?
> Not at all obviously. Israel is committing a genocide. This is not really a matter of discussion... you think several parts of the UN, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, the international association of genocide scholars, the international federation for human rights, Human Rights Watch, the Hague Group, the governments of Ghana, Malaysia, Mexico, China, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Ireland, (and dozens of others), the African Union, the Jewish voice for peace, and dozens of small orgs just all... got it wrong?
I could list organizations with the opposite view as well, but I don't really consider arguments from authority to be all that strong.
> the international association of genocide scholars
They have certainly had some interesting members[0].
> China
Because they would be the ones to know?[1]
> all... got it wrong?
Obviously.
> Why should I believe a random HN comment warrior over literally hundreds of organizations and governments whose jobs include identifying genocide when it happens?
Facts actually do matter and when you look into the details it's clear that the claims of genocide are simply not backed up by the evidence.
> What makes your case so compelling it stands up against all that and what my own eyes see?
My case is simply that the evidence is insufficient to support the claim.
> Just so I understand correctly, are you implying here that you consider the persecution of Uyghurs a genocide?
Based on the publicly available evidence I would consider it to potentially be genocide, certainly it's more plausible than the accusations against Israel since China isn't at war with the Uyghurs from my understanding.
However keep in mind International law requires Dolus Specialis(special intent) for something to be considered Genocide which is a very high bar. Note that war crimes or crimes against humanity alone would be insufficient to reach that bar.[0]
> Two, the intent is clearly genocide. Listen to Ben-Gvir.
Saying Ben-Gvir has genocidal intent(which I'd probably largely agree with) is not remotely the same as saying Israel has genocidal intent. The power dynamics in Israel are much more complicated and one should not conflate things said by the most extreme ministers as actual policy.
Just as an example hypothetical, if there were evidence that the Israeli government was implementing as a clear matter of top down government policy the deliberate extermination/targeting of Palestinian civilians with no plausible military/security justification then that would probably be considered genocidal intent by a state. I think such a policy would also then have to be successfully implemented for it to be considered an actual genocide.
Merely being say careless when it comes to civilian casualties in a war would not reach the bar of genocide by itself(although that could still be a war crime). The evidence I've seen so far indicates Israel operates with reasonable care to avoid civilian casualties where feasible(similar if not better than United States when say the United States fought ISIS).
Genocide in international law is an extremely high bar. Wars(even ones with many war crimes) generally do not reach that threshold.
Israel has openly, multiple times over decades, stated policy objectives that meet the purpose definition of genocide, and committed every single act enumerated in the Genocide Convention as constituting Genocide when committed with a genocidal goal in pursuit of those objectives as if they were using the defintion as a checklist.
That there were wars going on at the time does not make it any less of a genocide.
> That there were wars going on at the time does not make it any less of a genocide.
If some act is in pursuit of a legitimate war goal then that typically negates it being considered an act of genocide from my understanding of international law.
> If some act is in pursuit of a legitimate war goal then that typically negates it being considered an act of genocide from my understanding of international law.
Even if there was a dual-intent exception for acts that would be within the laws of war if done without genocidal intent (which there is not), it wouldn't apply to all the acts that are war crimes or crimes against humanity even aside from genocidal intent, such as those (including killings) done in the context or as part of collective punishment of civilian populations under occupation, use of starvation as a method of warfare, both deliberate and indiscriminate direct killing of civilians, etc.
> acts that are war crimes or crimes against humanity
AFAIU per international law either war crimes or crimes against humanity do not by themselves mean there is a genocide. Almost all wars will see these crimes in isolated instances at a minimum, but that doesn't translate to genocide without the dolus specialis(special intent) factor as a deliberate policy(i.e. Nazi's implementing the Holocaust as policy).
> AFAIU per international law either war crimes or crimes against humanity do not by themselves mean there is a genocide
Correct, and I didn't say that they did.
I said that even if enumerated acts of genocide in the convention, committed with genocidal intent, were excluded as being genocide by some “dual intent” rule—which I can find no evidence of ever existing or being theorized by any serious authority on international law—if they were in the context of war and would be legitimate acts of war when done without genocidal intent, that still wouldn’t stop all the acts Israel has done with genocidal intent, even if during war, that include acts enumerated as genocidal acts in the Convention and which are, even aside from genocidal intent, war crimes or crimes against humanity and, therefore, not legitimate acts of war even before considering whether they constitute genocide, from satisfying the defintion of genocide in the Convention.
You are basically arguing that you can never have genocide during a war because otherwise legitimate acts of war, committed with genocidal intent, don’t count even if they are enumerated genocidal acts in the convention, and war crimes and crimes against humanity done with genocidal intent that are or include enumerated genocidal acts also don’t count as genocide when committed during war because “all wars will see these crimes”.
But aside from the fact that no basis for the claim that either of these exceptions actually exists in international law has been offered, this ignores that the specific genocides that motivated the convention were committed during wars; its bizarre to argue that the Convention should be read to sub silentio exclude all enumerated genocidal acts perpetrated with the described genocidal intent that happen to occur during war from the scope of the prohibition on genocide.
> You are basically arguing that you can never have genocide during a war because otherwise legitimate acts of war, committed with genocidal intent, don’t count even if they are enumerated genocidal acts in the convention, and war crimes and crimes against humanity done with genocidal intent that are or include enumerated genocidal acts also don’t count as genocide when committed during war because “all wars will see these crimes”.
I'm arguing that the genocidal intent is really the crux of the issue and that the genocidal intent needs especially strong evidence in a war.
Legitimate war goals existing for a conflict generally raise the evidentiary bar for something to be considered a genocide as they tend to serve as the plausible alternate non-genocidal intent.
I mean, you presuppose a genocide. A lie repeated is still a lie though. All wars are not genocides. Just because we now can see the suffering doesn't make it a genocide (and especially not because of all the fake suffering, like the people "freezing to death" in 20 degree celsius, or that pulitzer prize winning photo of a child with an unrelated disease, etc).
> It sure does presuppose that. Because that's not really a factual debate at this point. See my comment higher.
But it is. The deaths are surprisingly low for urban warfare even if we accept Hamas numbers. A lot of deaths that are doctors or journalists turns out later to have also been Islamic Jihad or Hamas fighters. The IDF routinely avoided civilians, while Hamas explicitly embedded itself. Israel even vaccinated Gazan children during the war.
You can claim that SOME people from Israel wants a genocide and were trying to do it sure, just like the Bondi Beach attacker was genocidal. But to claim the war as a whole was genocide is absurd. It just falls flat on the numbers alone.
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.
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.
yes I did, and I actually counter biased myself after the brainwashing of the marshall plan about holocaust (not about negating it now of course).
going from grieving holocaust to seeing one done by those who were persecuted.
no need to ask for an example, I know that non genocidal zionism exists and that there are actually many forms of it, and while I deeply respect those that are still human beings (and not fanatics genocidal colonizers) the world facts just confirm how evil and fanatic its core and philosophy is, and how widespread is in your country.
Mods will almost always turn off flagging for stories if you email them. I think it's too easy to flag something to death and not enough people know they can just email the mods
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 had the same exact thought. It's implied, but I don't think the article explicitly states that the content produced by the think tank has minimal or no human involvement.
I think the "it's just SEO" or "propaganda isn't new" comments are missing the bigger picture. Given how LLMs are effectively being treated as core processing components by so many automations, generating information to skew LLM training could be considered similar to adding a back door to an actual CPU.
For example, if someone writes a generic prompt to flag offensive language, the LLM would flag certain political views whether or not the language was offensive. Causing friction and effectively discrimination against groups of people even though it was not the writer's intention.
An even more serious example would be someone in the military screening targets and the LLM marking a school or hospital as a valid target without the user intending to.
To be clear, I'm not stating that either of these doesn't happen intentionally, but that any manipulation of LLM training data can cause these things to happen when the user did not intend it, and hence it's similar to adding a back door or corrupting a CPU.
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.
The scale of a war is more often decided by who decides to unexpectedly jump in moreso than the initial party. WW1 starts when a Bosnian Serb assassinates an Austro-Hungarian royal leading to Austria-Hungary invading Serbia. The the next thing you know Brits are killing Germans over it.
There are endless border clashes. Even in very recent times we have Armenia-Azerbaijan, Afghanistan-Pakistan, Thailand-Cambodia, and many more. Wiki gives more than 60 in the 21st century [1], and we're just getting started! And if other parties had decided to get involved and start jamming up the escalation ladder, any of those could have easily turned into a much bigger war, instead of being just yet another relatively inconsequential border conflict.
Or imagine if another country (perhaps Russia or China) had decided to 'pull a US' when the US invaded any of the countless countries we've invaded over the years - Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Yemen, and so on just in quite recent times. That could very well have led to WW3, but it didn't because they didn't.
Not sure it is true. If it was true that all Russians know it’s just propaganda and that they are just engaged in an illegal genocide then less Russians would sign up for the army.
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?
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.
They do. It's already like this with business recommendations, always use a personal reference before anything else.
I've thought about making some digital reputation system that cannot be gamed. You can rep people you know and then query if there's any path of rep from you to a random person. The global number of reps you have doesn't matter, only paths. Problem is this only works if the target person can't tell that you repped them, which is impossible to hide because they can just rep you with a fake account then see if there's a path to their real account. But maybe with some fuzzing.
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.
So what happens when people are paid or otherwise incentivised to 'trust'?
This model was used in the beginning of the web, where links to your site from a well trusted website would increase the score and therefore SEO of your own site. This very quickly turned into a business of people selling hidden paid site links, and evolved into the paid editorial model we see on every news site today.
Hm, that's an interesting point. But wasn't problem of that model that the social graph (links) were not really public, but rather hidden within a search engine such as Google? Maybe if they are public the problem would be mitigated.
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.
This is exactly how bubbles of influence appear. Rarely do people from different leanings (social, political, economical etc) have spheres of opinion which intersect, and therefore get trapped in areas of general agreement. The social graph cannot be trusted to create a generally trusted source, because peoples innate distrust of things which differ from their own opinion skew this model heavily.
I should have noted, my comment is about facts. Opinion you can have, if you think it's beneficial for you not to trust (or trust) some nodes, do so!
The public social graph would be about who is a human, that can certify facts. Their opinion wouldn't really matter until you chose it to matter for you. Them being a human witness would only add credence to the accounts of the facts they witnessed, nothing more. You can still choose to disbelief the event if you have a good reason to (for example, even if you might believe a guy from Russia is a real person based on his social graph, if he certifies an event in Michigan, you might be skeptical of that account and decide to lower your own trust in that person). So there is a difference between the shared social graph - which is about a collective belief of who is a person, and your own trust, which you can modify as you wish. Unlike with Google and other big tech providers, there is not a singular "algorithm for trust" that can be manipulated.
You seem to be saying it will fail because people are tribal. I believe it will not fail, because the benefits of knowing the local social graph of each person will outweigh the tendency for opinion to split based on tribe. And the reason I think so is that trust evolved and exists in society; we do not only trust ourselves, and that's only possible if something like a social graph can work. The only issue is the scale, which can be solved by using a computer instead of computing it in our little heads.
Mass reporting means spending huge amount of reputation which doesn't really invalidate reputation of people who still certify that the person exists.
The problem with the current systems is that reputation buying is not transparent. In my system, it would be a public record, who endorsed who. So you could go back and track the fake reputation.
Also real people have some TTL with their accounts. Unlike links, "I am real person" is not nearly as fungible.
It's interesting that (as per the article) the work pumped out by this synthetic think tank does not seem to align / disfavours the official party line of the country. You'd imagine if this was propaganda, it would be supportive of the official stance. I wonder what the objective is then, reputation-building for later influence? Something else?
> the work pumped out by this synthetic think tank does not seem to align / disfavours the official party line of the country
The article DOES NOT say this- it says that sometimes this seems to be the case, but reports exactly one example of extremely little significance. In the meanwhile,
"Piro, Inc, the firm that created the Hanover Institute, has received $900,000 from the Israeli government for its work."
Opening the linked example, one sees that the article is basically dedicated to laundering the idea that there were many "antisemitic incidents" at Columbia University.
The article doesn't say that the work disfavors the party line, just that they don't always align perfectly. Which isn't that surprising considering that governments make self-contradictory statements all the time (consider Trump, for example).
> 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.
I read this paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13722) on pre-training poisoning of LLMs. The authors demonstrated that poisoning 0.1% of the pretraining dataset can measurably manipulate beliefs of the model.
What I read about is a more sophisticated supply chain attack. But these days, search previews use retrieval-augmented generation to parse websites to generate answers on the fly. In that case you don't need to poison the supply chain; good SEO is enough.
> ...a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”
Apparently he was an executive producer, in case anyone else is confused, as I was initially, by the fact that Brian Grazer is credited as producer of that film.
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!
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.
Thanks for this, it's crazy that I had to scroll so far to see it on this site.
The headline sounds sensational, then if you actually read the article you realize the author just made up his own framing entirely, or he just discovered that AEO and GEO exists and thinks it's sinister?
I thought maybe there were going to be some markers about how they're targeting LLMs specifically there was nothing like that.
And if you go to https://hanoverinstitute.com/llms.txt ...honestly, you could maybe form a critique about implying to LLMs that your wagon is hitched to the Department of Justice on line 5! But this guy didn't even seem to find this file...
"Israel creates fake think tank" is the headline. What is a "think tank"? What distinguishes a real one from a fake one? Does "the Hanover Institute" claim to be a think tank?
The author does not answer any of these questions, only saying "At a glance, the Hanover Institute for Public Policy looks like a new think tank dedicated to Israel/Palestine": in other words, he glanced at it, decided it looked like a think tank, then decided it wasn't a "real" one, and then went from there. That is very much the author's framing instead of something grounded in objectivity.
>The article clearly explain the information poisoning
The article says "Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as 'LLM poisoning.'"
But the Anthropic paper that it cites to support this claim never discusses persuasive content, propaganda, or credibility-mimicking material at all; it uses "poisoning" for a technically distinct attack class. So the citation doesn't support the claim as written.
>stop polluting this thread in an organized and selfish self supporting way. so typical
What do you mean by this? How am I organized? Why is it selfish to criticize an article?
everything I posted was in response to you; nothing is random.
>confused informations
Just saying they're confused is meaningless; if you think I am wrong about something, feel free to give actual rebuttals.
>tentative
This word is defined as "not certain or fixed; provisional" or "done without confidence; hesitant". It is an adjective, not a noun. I genuinely do know know what you mean when you use this word.
>a tentative of misinformation
>>What does this mean?
claiming not knowing what tentative means in english is clearly on purpose and could anyway be translated if it was a language problem.
again here:
>tentative
>>This word is defined as "not certain or fixed; provisional" or "done without confidence; hesitant". It is an adjective, not a noun. I genuinely do know know what you mean when you use this word.
Everybody knows what a tentative is and also looking it up and reporting a single possible translation of its meaning is just ridiculous.
again stop dragging the conversation off topic and stop on purpose provoking.
the repeated statements clearly confirms your negative intention and your previous content does not add any value.
for the sake of clarity to the readers I will report here the points more clearly again:
- mentioning SEO,AEO or other stuff here is clearly a tentative of misinformation and confusion of readers. moving the attention to an off topic relationship.
- the claim "the author just made up his own framing entirely" is clearly an accusation without any reasoning or logic backing it up
- The article clearly explain the information poisoning, fast paced publication and ties to government, nothing else. and thats the main point and target.
I will not waste more time on replying to purposely fabricated statements or questions.
I have spoken English my whole life and have never heard anyone use "tentative" as a noun. Why must you assume I am trolling, why can you not believe what I am saying? Is it possible that you are using the wrong word? It seems noteworthy to me that you did not actually answer my question or provide a definition for how you are using, you chose to assume bad faith on my part instead and use that as a basis to dismiss the actual arguments I made.
That said, I would be happy to stop arguing about the word "tentative". I would much rather you engage with the substantive arguments that I made.
>the repeated statements clearly confirms your negative intention
What repeated statements? If it's important to you for understanding then pick something that I repeated and I can try to explain.
> ::your three list items::
These are just repeating of arguments that I made and offered responses to. You have chosen to not respond to them.
Let's pick one and try again:
> The article clearly explain the information poisoning
If you search the article for "poison", there is exactly one reference: "Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as 'LLM poisoning.'" The word "refer links to an article by Anthropic that is categorically unrelated. Go read that article and answer: does their definition of "poisoning" match what the author of this post means?
I would say no: the article says "malicious actors can inject specific text into these posts to make a model learn undesirable or dangerous behaviors, in a process known as poisoning", and then follows up with an example of "introducing backdoors". That is very different than whatever the Hanover Institute site is doing.
If you would prefer to argue substance, answer me that: did the author cite that paper correctly? I am saying "no" and have given a reason, what is your response?
hah you make me laugh, trying really hard, so typical from your society!
problem is the world now knows, no need to cry about antisemitism.
keep trying, the truth is clear, you are only doing bad evil things since long time and your government and ministers states it publicly too!
If my ministers would claim the dream of killing kids or people I would feel totally ashamed of them and I would not support it online spamming every thread!
I haven't lived in Israel for more than 10 years, it is not my society, and yet I am ashamed of the current goverment and never ever have I supported them online. I have done more in my lifetime to oppose these people than you will do even in 10,000 years, in campaigning, in arrests, in protests and in court. I wish your posts made me laugh too, but they actually fill me with sadness.
nice try guys, no need to generate confusion also here, the purpose target and implementations are very clear from the article and the actors behind even more.
please do not pollute this thread with misinformation too.
this clearly a defensive stance without a real motivstion.
"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."
called out? yes your defensive and not-motivated stance should be called out and this comment flagged.
disguising affiliation and poisoning information is exactly what happens in a propaganda campaign and in the activities carried and clearly explained in the article.
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.
The wildcard is the "antisemite!" Accusations that get flung your way when you point out the genocide. If they can train the LLMs to associate the Gaza slaughter or the west bank "settlers" with antisemitism, they could get the LLMs to shut down on moral grounds.
Antizionism is a violent hate movement built on libels, lies, and obsessing over Israel. It is an anti-Jewish hatred that seeks to divide Jews and deprive at least half of their sovereignty, history and human rights.
Belloc's The Jews is a nice introduction to this issue. He wrote it a century ago when things were similarly heating up, but before things had clearly boiled over.
He was prescient when he said:
"For if the quarrel is allowed to rise unchecked and to proceed unappeased, we shall come, unexpectedly and soon, upon one of these tragedies which have marked for centuries the relations between this peculiar nation and ourselves."
He was a devout Catholic, had Jewish friends, and devoted a chapter to what was wrong with antisemitism. He was earnestly trying to solve the problem before it was too late.
In the topic presented there is really no relevance to Israel being a Jewish state. This is a nation state acting nefariously to protect its interests, something I am quite sure many nations are either doing right now or will shortly start doing. e.g. I could absolutely picture Russia doing exactly this.
> He was a devout Catholic, had Jewish friends, and devoted a chapter to what was wrong with antisemitism
And yet he insisted that Jewish people are separate from any nation and should never be considered part of the native population of the country they were born and raised in. Which is, you know, antisemitic.
It's telling that your perception of a nation state acting badly leads you to a book named "The Jews".
Or Russia, Iran, China, USA etc. Are you saying USA has done nothing to try and influence the rest of the world? CIA would never try and influence others
I welcome it honestly- if the internet becomes sufficiently poisoned then our personal data may become indistinguishable from AI generated content and companies may no longer be able to sell it- I happen to have a unique name globally and at times I’ve considered creating a dozen or so fake profiles sharing my name to spread around so that my own digital footprint becomes even slightly muddied
Here's a SMS chain between me and an Israeli propaganda bot yesterday:
Hey, it's Matt. Curious what you think about America's relationship with Israel today. Can we chat? Stop2End
Where did you get my number? What group are you with?
We got your info from publicly available sources. I'm with Friends for Peace, a supporter group focused on sharing accurate information about Israel and the U.S. - Israel partnership.
How do you see Israel as one of America's strongest allies?
I wonder if anyone can read the comments in this thread and think with a straight face that these comments are actual information and the other stuff floating on the Internet is the fake stuff…
- post truth: what is the functional difference between a “real” and a “fake” thinktank?
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.
He writes about it in Fall, or; Dodge in hell! The Miasma; the workaround is personalized filters (or generic ones for those who can't afford the personal ones). This leads to societal consequences.
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.
This is 1/10,000th of the bile that Qatar churns out with their state propaganda wing every day. Not to mention their brigades on Wikipedia and Reddit. The only surprising thing here is that Israel is so far behind in the game. There is a genuine fear that basic facts are being erased as LLMs suck up all the misinformation pumped out by authoritarian regimes. A hundred articles from an Israeli ad campaign are a drop in the ocean of hatred aimed at their people and government. Not much to see here other than the author's biases.
Something to keep in mind - responsiblestatecraft.org is published by the Quincy Institue, considered by many to be a de-facto lobbying group for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Here is one data point: https://quillette.com/2024/06/20/the-quincy-institute-middle...
Thanks for the heads up. It's useful information. From the article:
> The Quincy Institute routinely vilifies supporters of Israel in Washington. Its principal goal is to reorient American policy in the Middle East, marginalising America’s two leading allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, while promoting Iran as a future regional hegemon. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby, are both Quincy fellows and regular contributors to its website. In March, Mearsheimer gave an interview to Al Jazeera, which the Institute promoted under the headline, “Israel Lobby’s Influence on U.S. Policy as Powerful as Ever.”
Sounds no different to what Israel lobbyists do in the US too, though? American democracy at work ...
Here's the difference though - Israel is an ally of the United States while Iran is a sworn enemy that has killed thousands of Americans since the 1979 revolution and routinely chants "Death to America". So, not equivalent.
No reason? And how exactly do you see that? The Iran of 60 years ago before the revolution was a completely different country than it is today. It has taken glee in killing thousands of Americans directly and through its proxies, and shouted death to America a gazillion times since.
I see all you've got from the past 60 years is one tragic friendly fire incident. Iran has intentionally killed thousands of American civilians and service men either directly or through its proxies since 1979, including 43 American civilians murdered and 13 taken hostage on October 7, 2023.
Israeli lobby sent those US soldiers to the Mid East in the first place. It's not the early 2000s anymore, American public isn't buying the WMDs excuse again.
America was first to torture, take hostage and kill thousands of Iranian civilians through the CIA and SAVAK. I understand completely why Iranians despise Israel and America.
Why do you expect me to get angry at Iranians for using American tactics? Is turnabout not fair play, am I supposed to support it when the US and Israel tortures people but balk when Iran does it?
Israel is very open about manipulating public opinion in the US. They call it hasbara and they just vastly increased their budget for doing it. You don't need the Quincy Institute (not that there's anything wrong with them!) to learn about it either. Here's a recent Time article:
I don't take any issue with this pic if it's real, but it seems either fake or not from where he claims. So it's hard to take that org seriously. And yeah tbh that last name makes me take a second look.
The plane's proportions look out of whack in the photo. I don't think the scribbling is implausible, but either way it's strange for an exec of an org like that to be posting unverified stuff like that.
Who founded it, who funds it, what is the broad consensus on the coverage they typically run, what do I see in their coverage when I look through it, what have they retracted, what have they not retracted, what advertisers do they permit. Probably some other criteria, to be honest. Maybe "does the editor here seem to have a conscience".
ALL think tanks are specifically focused on moving the needle on ideas in a certain direction. It’s just easier now to do the work.
This article is published by “The Quincy Institute for Statecraft”
Think tanks are funded by people with agendas (mostly) and for at least the last 30 years we have seen a huge number of nonsense “think tanks” pushing talking points with zero rigor that end up cited by candidates, the internet, and Google to convince folks things are true.
Not saying this article is wrong - just that think tanks exist to do this so it’s a cast iron pot calling a tin kettle a “cheap imitation”
"The practical and moral failures of U.S. efforts to unilaterally shape the destiny of other nations by force requires a fundamental rethinking of U.S. foreign policy assumptions."
In case you were wondering, responsiblestatecraft.org is owned by "Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft", founded and led by no other than reknowned IRI-propagandist Trita Parsi (currently being probed by US authorities for deportation).
Here are the current frontpage headlines, copied verbatim:
* The never-ending myth of a looming Ukrainian 'breakthrough'
* US is the real loser if Senate passes virtue signaling Russia sanctions
* Is Trump stumbling into a wiser North Korea policy?
* US diplomatic incompetence is tanking hopes for Korean peace
* When US left Afghanistan, China moved in. So how's it going?
* As Myanmar collapses, it’s time for China to step up and be the hero
* China just got one step closer to its own nuclear triad
* Trump wants to talk to Hezbollah. Will they pick up the phone?
* The Houthis could be first big test for Mecca mutual defense pact
* Why the Trump administration will have to accept a Hormuz toll
* How Iran has staved off economic collapse despite the US-Israeli war
* Stop gaslighting, USS Lincoln families didn't sign up for this
So to recap: US bad, China good. Ukraine bad, Russia good. Israel bad, Iran good. South Korea bad, North Korea good. And these people are very concerned about foreign propaganda. Hmm.
Also, did you notice how many flagged comments are in this thread? Did you notice what they all have in common?
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.
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.
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 didn't say it was antisemitism. I have seen a lot of online references to anyone who disagrees with XYZ political position as "subhuman" lately, for an shockingly broad range of values of XYZ.
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.
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…
It's incredibly cynical to demonize Jews for living in our historic homeland and turning desert sand into thriving cities[0]. It's what we prayed for daily for centuries after being thrown out of Europe. Now it's here, now we're living it, and haters call us by our persecutors' name for doing it.
Tel-aviv is honestly incredibly impressive, I’ve been there and the place is amazing - that it was just a sand dune and without the Arab oil wealth still managed to make this land into an amazing place to live…
Don’t think anyone is faulting people for that - it’s the other side of the coin that the whole world is kinda not really liking.
And it’s not like there aren’t examples of successful integrations - even with internal tensions some places do manage to just make people live together, it’s hard yes but not impossible… just have to have the will and smarts for it, wonder what the current Israeli government is lacking…
How should they have dealt with it? The responses have been pretty reasonable. Even 2023 was a reasonable response. Only as the war dragged on did it go to far in my opinion.
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.
Do you hold the same standard for native Americans?
And yes, people are responsible for their actions. Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist group whose founding charter calls for the violent overthrow of the world's only Jewish state, started a war on October 7th, 2023. Israel fought back and won, and now Hamas is paying dearly for what they did.
So why keep talking to claim the opposite again, trying to absolve Israel of responsibility again?
> Hamas, an Islamic fundamentalist group whose founding charter calls for the violent overthrow of the world's only Jewish state
... was sponsored by those who now use them as a pre-text. And that old, initial version of their charter, since revised, is still a joke to bring up in attempt to deflect from what IDF and Israeli politicians showed and show us, right now.
Israeli right-wing extremists, racists and fascists want more land, and don't consider Palestinians (or people in Libya or Iran, for that matter) as people, never did. Trying to kick up sand and pointing at some "other" just makes it more pathetic, it means you're just doubling down on such a pathetic and evil enterprise.
> the world's only Jewish state
It's Israel and Israelis. Buying land and calling it Israel doesn't make it biblical Israel, if God wanted to found a country he'd let you know. In the reality I do care about, Israel is the only state claiming to be a democracy whose supreme court allows torture, or that refuses to define its borders. Not allowing "mixed" marriages is also cringe, but in this context meh, who cares, let them be cringe. But even hinting at the the Torah while there's people singing about how there are no children in Gaza is an insolence you can try on someone else. Shame on you for implicitly invoking murdered people who were treated like Palestinians are treated by Israelis today. The nerve.
> Hamas is paying dearly for what they did.
Repeating such robotic one-liners is just the attempt to evade accountability for collective punishment plus other war crimes and crimes against humanity. That's some "winning" you're doing. Like a toddler that can no longer even scream coherent words, violence is the only remaining bridge Israel has to the rest of the world.
> "So why keep talking to claim the opposite again, trying to absolve Israel of responsibility again?"
Because Israel winning a war they didn't start is a good thing, actually. Israel fighting until the hostages were released is a good thing.
> "And that old, initial version of their charter, since revised, is still a joke to bring up in attempt to deflect from what IDF and Israeli politicians showed and show us, right now."
Hamas still wants its original goal, it still wants to destroy the Jewish people and institute an Islamic fundamentalist state. Theirs is an antisemitic, genocidal agenda, encoded in the group's founding document and still believed and fought for by its members.
> "repeating such robotic one-liners is just the attempt to evade accountability for collective punishment plus other war crimes and crimes against humanity."
Hamas started a war and lost it. With Hamas thoroughly defeated, their foolish supporters in the West are now relegated to screeching false accusations against Jews online. I'm ok with that.
A real genocide -- for which the term was first coined -- looks like a population whose numbers are still lower some 90 years later. Nazi Germany committed genocide against Jews in Europe in 1939, killing 6 million Jews, and the worldwide Jewish population today still hasn't recovered to pre-1939 levels.
Hamas wants to do the same to Jews today. Israel won't let them. And this is the root cause of conflict in the Middle East.
> 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.
By "continuous presence," you mean that a tiny number of Jews lived there. The vast majority of Jews lived elsewhere, and the vast majority of the local population was not Jewish.
I'm sorry, but 5% of the population of Palestine being Jewish does not give one the right to take over the country, not to mention the fact that the longstanding Jewish population of Palestine was hostile to Zionism. It was a European political movement.
If continuous presence in a land doesn't define a people's right to exist as a nation, you know what does?
The ability to create and defend borders.
Israel has that. Israel was invaded on the day it declared independence on May 14th, 1948. Invaded by 9 Arab nations and armies[0], Israel not only successfully defended itself and won the war, it even gained territory from the aggressors.
Israel has a right to exist because its people have had a continuous presence in that land going back longer than the British have been in London, longer than the French have been in Paris.
Israel has a right to exist because it defends its people and its borders and has the approval of the United Nations, UN Resolution 181.
The only people who deny this right of Jews to return to their native homeland? Bonafide neo-Nazis, Islamic fundamentalists, KKK members, and other antisemites.
> If continuous presence in a land doesn't define a people's right to exist as a nation, you know what does?
You're playing a deliberate sleight of hand here. A tiny number of Jews lived as a small minority in Palestine, therefore Jews were always there, therefore European Jews have the right to turn Palestine into a Jewish state.
The "continuous presence" was tiny, and had nothing to do with the millions of Jews who lived in Europe - the people who later founded Israel.
> Israel has that. Israel was invaded on the day it declared independence on May 14th, 1948. Invaded by 9 Arab nations and armies, Israel not only successfully defended itself and won the war, it even gained territory from the aggressors.
The Zionist paramilitary groups had already been waging war against the Palestinians for 6 months by the time the Arab armies intervened. The Zionists had already driven hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of their homes and conquered much of Palestine. But Israelis like to present this as little old us being attacked by the big mean Arab armies.
> The only people who deny this right of Jews to return to their native homeland? Bonafide neo-Nazis, Islamic fundamentalists, KKK members, and other antisemites.
You forgot to mention Jewish people. The large majority of Jews were antizionist before WWII, and opposition to Zionism has always been a prominent position among Jews. And inversely, many of the strongest proponents of Zionism have always been antisemites (for example, right-wing Christians in the US today).
Imagine if in the year 3600 AD, an African American political movement were to start saying that Africa is their true homeland and that they have the right to take over Ghana and to turn it into their own state. It would be absurd, and the Ghanaians would fight it tooth and nail.
Yet here you are saying that Palestine was the true homeland of Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, and that European Jews had a 2000-year-old right to take over Palestine, regardless of what the people who lived there had to think about it.
Albert Einstein legally traveled to British Mandate Palestine in 1923 to help set up the Hebrew University - on land that was legally purchased.
While some Arabs (and Jews) were displaced during the War of independence, most of Israel’s cities are built on land that was legally purchased, and the vast majority of Israelis immigrated legally.
Making it sound like all of the land was stolen because some Jews immigrated from Europe is like saying that Muslim migrants are stealing European land.
> Albert Einstein legally traveled to British Mandate Palestine in 1923
You're claiming that visiting once made him native to Palestine? He was a German. That was his native language, his culture, the world he grew up in.
> Making it sound like all of the land was stolen because some Jews immigrated from Europe is like saying that Muslim migrants are stealing European land.
Have Muslim immigrants to Europe established their own country through the mass expulsion of the pre-existing European population?
The Zionists weren't just immigrants to Palestine. They openly declared that their goal was to turn Palestine into their own country.
> most of Israel’s cities are built on land that was legally purchased
This is simply untrue. The vast majority of what became Israel was conquered, and the local population was expelled. Haifa, Jaffa, Nazareth, Ramle, Lod, Be'er Sheva, Ashdod - these were all Arab cities that Israel conquered.
> the vast majority of Israelis immigrated legally
They arrived under British rule, when the native population of Palestine had virtually no say in its own governance. The native population deeply resented the British promising Palestine to a foreign people, and allowing them to come in and build up their own settlements and quasi-governmental institutions. The Palestinians knew exactly what the intentions of the Zionist movement were, and they obviously opposed it, as any people in their situation would have done. So yes, much of the Zionist immigration was "legal" according to the British, but the British were illegitimate colonial occupiers who were pursuing a policy that was almost universally opposed by the native population.
Looking at the largest population centers in Israel:
Jerusalem (pop. 1M): was 54% Jewish in 1922 and is 59% Jewish now. Jewish purchase and development of land there predates the British Mandate.
Tel Aviv (pop. 400k) - excluding Jaffa (pop. 50k): Pro-Palestinians like to conflate it with Jaffa because the two municipalities merged. But the vast majority of it is a city built on sand dunes purchased by Jews starting in the Ottoman era.
Petah Tikva, Rishon LeZion, Netanya, Bnei Brak (1M): Jewish cities built by Jews on land purchased legally.
Haifa (pop. 300k): was 54% Jewish in 1945, it’s 72% Jewish now.
The population of Nazareth is almost 100% Arab.
Ashdod was built on sand dunes 6 kilometres north of the town of Isdud, which was depopulated in 1948. The ruins of Isdud are still standing to the south of Ashdod.
We can acknowledge that some Arabs were forced out of some towns during the war - the Arab armies forced out every single Jew from the areas they conquered during the same war. However, the core of the conflict is the Arab side insisting that Jews have no right to any land between the river and the sea simply because of who they are.
You think that Jews of European heritage have some fundamental un-right to live in Petah Tikva?
Many Europeans and Americans oppose the immigration policies of their governments. Can they claim in 100 years time that the migrations were illegal?
> We can acknowledge that some Arabs were forced out of some towns during the war
That's a massive understatement. The Zionists / Israelis[0] expelled 80% of the native population of the territory that became Israel in 1948.
Across Palestine, Zionist / Israeli forces carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing, with the goal of capturing as large a territory as possible with as few Arabs as possible.
In Haifa, Zionist forces first carried out a campaign of terrorism, which caused nearly half of the Arab population to flee. Then, they launched a massive attack on the Arab neighborhoods, deliberately shelling civilian areas and using psychological warfare (threatening radio broadcasts in Arabic, for example) to try to convince the local population to flee. By the end, more than 90% of the Arab population had fled, and the city fell to Zionists forces.
This pattern was repeated across Palestine. The area that eventually became Israel had a large Arab majority: 60% to 40%. After the Israelis were done kicking out the Arab population, less than 15% of the population was Arab.
> the Arab armies forced out every single Jew from the areas they conquered during the same war.
The Arabs hardly conquered any territory in 1948. They were largely on the back foot. The vast majority of people who were violently expelled from their homes in 1948 were Arab.
> However, the core of the conflict is the Arab side insisting that Jews have no right to any land between the river and the sea simply because of who they are.
That's what you think the "core of the conflict is"? Not the fact that a foreign people came into Palestine and announced that they were going to turn it into their own country - and then actually did so through the expulsion of 80% of the native population? The goals of the Zionists made war with the native population completely unavoidable. Do you think that any population anywhere else on Earth would have allowed their country to be taken over by a foreign people - who wanted to establish their own state on it - without resisting?
> You think that Jews of European heritage have some fundamental un-right to live in Petah Tikva?
You talk about this as if it were just a few people immigrating to a foreign country and wanting to settle down among the locals. That's not what Zionism was. It was a movement that aimed to turn an Arab land, inhabited almost entirely by non-Jews, into a Jewish state, regardless of what the native population wanted. It was essentially a foreign invasion, facilitated by the British Empire, which held down the locals long enough for the Zionists to gain a strong foothold in Palestine.
> Many Europeans and Americans oppose the immigration policies of their governments. Can they claim in 100 years time that the migrations were illegal?
You keep talking about Zionism as if it were just a few immigrants arriving in a country and settling down. Are Mexican immigrants in the United States part of a large, organized movement that has declared that it will turn the United States into a new Mexican country for Mexicans alone? Zionism was an attempt to turn Palestine into a Jewish state. The locals were not even consulted. They were forced to accept it by a foreign empire - the British Empire - that ruled over them undemocratically.
0. I use this term because Israel was officially founded in the middle of the conflict. Zionist paramilitaries became the Israeli army.
The Arabs expelled 100% of all Jews in the territories they gained. To this day territories under control of the Palestinian authority are kept ethnically cleansed of Jews.
The Jews were migrating in accordance with local laws, and they bought deserted land at fair prices and developed them from the ground up into the big beautiful cities they are now. Until the British banned land sale to Jews and severely restricted migration (preventing Jews from fleeing the Holocaust), at the behest of the Arabs.
Any mass migration comes with a level of power in a democracy, and demographic changes are happening all over the Western world. Brussles is now majority foreign. London and NYC have Muslim mayors.
The Arabs just couldn’t take it that they will be one Middle Eastern country where Jews have significant authority and equal rights.
> To this day territories under control of the Palestinian authority are kept ethnically cleansed of Jews.
This is an insane statement. Israel controls all of East Jerusalem and the entire West Bank. They are moving their own settlers into those territories, in violation of international law, with the goal of annexing them to Israel. The Palestinians in the West Bank live under military occupation and are subject to constant violent pogroms at the hands of Israeli settlers, who have the backing of the IDF.
Yet in your narrative, the Israelis are somehow the victims here, because the Palestinians don't want them to keep stealing more land.
> The Arabs just couldn’t take it that they will be one Middle Eastern country where Jews have significant authority and equal rights.
They couldn't take it that European settlers would take over Palestine. You seem to have a very hard time accepting that the native population of Palestine should have had any say in whether their country, which was 95% Arab, should be gifted to European settlers.
> London and NYC have Muslim mayors.
Last I checked, London was still part of the UK, and NYC was still part of the US. The UK and US didn't have immigration laws forced on them by a foreign empire - they decided democratically that they're okay with a percent or so immigration each year. And Mamdani isn't trying to turn NYC into a breakaway Muslim state that will leave the US and declare Muslim supremacy over the rest of the population.
The WB is divided into zones. Look this up. Areas A are under full control of the Palestinian Authority. On the roads leading into these areas are big signs saying that it’s forbidden for Jews to enter.
It truly is insane that in this day and age there are parts of the world that are banned for Jews simply for being Jews. In addition, it is a capital offence punishable by death for Arabs to sell property to Jews. True apartheid.
Ultimately, your line of reasoning comes down to the concept of blood and soil, that the race of a person gives them unique rights to land and to reject others who they claim don’t have the correct genes to live there.
Jews were perfectly happy to share the land fairly with the other residents - as they do now with Israeli Arabs, who have full equal rights, and are doing much better than Arabs in neighbouring Arab countries, in terms income and life expectancy.
> It truly is insane that in this day and age there are parts of the world that are banned for Jews simply for being Jews.
It's the Israeli government that bans Israeli citizens from entering Area A. The Palestinians do not ban Jews from entering, and Jews enter all the time.
I am always amazed by the ability of Israelis to paint themselves as the victims in every situation. You control the entire West Band and hold millions of Palestinians under a brutal military regime. But in your mind, you're the victim. Incredible.
> Ultimately, your line of reasoning comes down to the concept of blood and soil, that the race of a person gives them unique rights to land and to reject others who they claim don’t have the correct genes to live there.
This is a crazy level of mental gymnastics. The Zionists announced that they wanted to take over Palestine and turn it into a Jewish state. But when the Zionist movement began, 95% of the population of Palestine was non-Jewish. Of course the population was against a foreign people coming in and taking over their country.
> Jews were perfectly happy to share the land fairly with the other residents - as they do now with Israeli Arabs, who have full equal right
The Zionists were actually adamant that Israel must have a large Jewish majority - large enough that the Arabs would have no meaningful political influence. Ben Gurion said it should be 80% at a minimum. Zionism is all about establishing a Jewish state, not a state that is simply for all of its citizens.
In order to achieve that overwhelming demographic majority in as large a part of Palestine as possible, it was necessary to expel the vast majority of the Arab population of the territory that became Israel - about 80%.
So when you say that the Israelis were perfectly happy to share the land fairly, that's just a pleasant lie - though maybe one you believe.
It was public knowledge that the Jews were removed against their will and are hoping to return (and have done so on different scales throughout history). This is documented even in Quran.
The Arabs knew when they moved in and built mosques on top of ancient Jewish holy sites that the land is contested. Still, the returning Jews by and large paid the occupiers to purchase the land fairly, and would happily pay Palestinians good money for more land in Judea and Samaria - which is why the PA needs to threaten to murder anyone who sells.
No, selling land to Israelis or people acting on behalf of Israel is punishable by death. The reason for this is that Israel is trying to annex the Palestinian territories, and every bit of territory that gets sold to Israelis is territory that will be permanently removed from Palestine. The Israelis establish settlers on the land and then use those settlements to argue that the land should belong to Israel.
This is viewed in the same way as selling land or national treasures to German occupiers during WWII would have been viewed in European countries.
> Jews who enter Area A are detained by PA forces and escorted out, or lynched. (With an exception of some token visits by activists).
Not true at all. I'm actually surprised by the number of Israelis who believe this, because American Jews visit Area A all the time, and are treated very well. There are actually some popular tourist destinations there, like Bethlehem. In my experience, Palestinians generally have nothing against Jews - they just don't like Israel.
The first cases you linked is one in which an armed Israeli man was handed over to the Israeli police, and the other is a case in which an Israeli family got lost and was handed over to the IDF.
What makes this really galling is that there is a wave of pogroms right now directed at Palestinians in the West Bank. Yet you're inverting this and presenting Israelis as the victims. It would be like claiming that whites were the true victims in the Jim Crow South, while black people were being lynched.
> Zionism started more than 2000 years ago.
Zionism started at the end of the 1800s. You're just trying to invent an alternate history.
> The Arabs knew when they moved in and built mosques on top of ancient Jewish holy sites that the land is contested.
This is insane. I'm sorry, but nobody gets to claim that land is "contested" in the modern age because an ancient Roman emperor expelled a group of people nearly 2000 years ago. You would laugh at any other group of people who made such a ridiculous claim.
The person you are replying to isn't arguing in good faith. They are a loyal propagandist for Israel, and their ability to spit lies and misinformation exceeds the rate at which you can correct it. It's a losing game.
You are either extremely ignorant or a cynical sociopath only out to serve your own interests. You spout old stereotypical hasbara that no one falls for anymore because the genocide has led everyone to be educated on the history of the region.
History. Jews have lived in Israel for 3,500 years. They were forced out numerous times by numerous conquerors -- including the Islamic conquest of the 8th century -- but each time, Jews returned.
And there is no genocide taking place, just a war Hamas started and lost. The Gazan population has already rebounded since Hamas started the war in 2023. For comparison with a real genocide, the global Jewish population today has still not rebounded to pre-1939 levels[0].
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.
"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)
“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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
> 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 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.
>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?
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.
No one is doing it as much as Israel does, Russia's influence campaigns are well documented, often weak, lack the "forcefulness" you see when it comes to Israel.
The thing is that messaging from Russia, China, Arab countries ... have to be very subtle else it's visible and immediately gets called out.
Israel on the other hand sees itself as part of the collective west and think they have the right to be as laud as they want and everyone has to listen.
it's fundamentally about who's talking and who's the audience.
for example Israel does run lots of influence campaigns in Arabic as well, but they're also more quite and more understanding that it's not their main audience.
How could you possibly know that? Do you have any numbers that put Israel's efforts into perspective, compared to those of other countries? This is not a good faith argument whatsoever.
There are uncensored interviews of former CIA agents conducted by credible reporters like Seymour Hersh. In The Samson Option, several witnesses confirm that Israel had unprecedented access to US spy satellites and convinced the CIA to cover up the (extremely controversial) Dimona facility.
Both of those "favors" are beyond anything that most US allies received at the time, especially at Israel's size. Even America's closest postwar allies like the UK, Sweden and Japan did not get that type of diplomatic cover, it was exclusive to Israel.
The earliest incarnations of ECHELON, to my knowledge, were relatively siloed and not comparable to Israel's intelligence status at the time. FIVE EYES did not include de-facto nuclear coverups, satellite downlink control or a physical presence within CIA offices and the Pentagon.
I know for one that Israeli lobbying groups in the US don't have to register as foreign agents, because they're technically run and funded by American citizens (often with dual Israel citizenship). Taking orders from Israeli officials doesn't change their standing because they have enough plausible deniability. If you can find a Russian counterpart to this with comparable funding or influence here, please show it.
Do you know of any other foreign governments that explicitly try to influence a host country at the detriment of its people? I can honestly only think of Israel + the US being the two worst offenders of this.
Who else do you think is doing it in a similar quantity?
This feels like a poor faith attempt to "muddy" the waters because when you start to question the utility of such relationships (giving a country military aid while your own citizens suffer) you realize how worthless the ally may have been.
Israelis, and their supporters, love to boast of Israel’s technical prowess and world leading capability in many areas.
Most people do this and Israelis are no different. However in Israel’s case there is evidence of its ability to build, hack and exploit technology at a very high level. The attacks on centrifuges and pagers being prime examples.
Yet when reports of these capabilities being used for influence appear suddenly Israel is being unfairly picked on? It doesn’t make sense.
Israel is very open about its use of propaganda. From AIPAC to “hasbra” to funding film and tv projects pushing particular viewpoints.
Russia and China do not have anything like the power to work like this Israel does. There is no Russian or Chinese AIPAC equivalent.
I agree with what you said about Israel's prowess and experience in this field. But Russia and China are not really that behind in propaganda, even if they may not have AIPAC equivalent in the west. Remember that Soviet Russians were instigating revolutions and toppling governments once, leading to the cold war. Today, RT is banned / censored in the west even as RT is investing heavily to increase its influence internationally (Putin arrives in India with a mega megaphone: Russia TV opens India arm with 100-member team - https://indianexpress.com/article/india/putin-india-mega-meg... ). The Americans had to buy TikTok to protect Israel's image (people were turning to TikTok as western platform were censoring everything on the genocide and Israel - TikTok sale could be ‘consequential’ for Israel, Jews, Netanyahu tells influencers - https://jewishinsider.com/2025/09/tiktok-sale-netanyahu-amer... ) and stop the spread of propaganda by China (Ahead of SCOTUS Hearing, Study Finds TikTok Is Likely Vehicle for Chinese Propaganda - https://gizmodo.com/ahead-of-scotus-hearing-study-finds-tikt... ).
Frankly speaking? It is because the people making people's influence operations the topic of conversation (at the national level) tend to be propagandists themselves. They aren't all that interested in a philosophical discourse trying to get people to make decisions in their own best interest or uncover the truth. They have a narrative and a job to do pushing it and they're perfectly happy to let temporary allies talk without interruption.
There's an interesting debate about whether that is helpful or not; the experience of democracy tends to be that your more at risk of getting high on your own supply when it comes to propaganda more than that an opponent is a risk.
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
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely! If Pakistan started committing a genocide and nobody talked about it but continued talking about Israel’s genocide, I would start to ask some questions. That is not the case though, no country on the planet is currently doing anything nearly as awful as Israel. So the coverage is well-calibrated.
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.
This is the city of 300k people that they erased along with the entire countryside (lot of the erasure happened outside of any fighting as reported by Israeli online news websites at the time).
And they did so right after getting order from ICJ to not do so and prevent any genocidal acts. So good luck for them not losing the genocide case. Massacred thousands of people in a week doing similar erasures in the north, where they prevented people from leaving while leveling entire city blocks, sometimes killin few hundred people at once in single attacks.
This is what they're attempting to justify with their propaganda.
Google and western so called civilized satellite imagery companies of course continue censoring/hiding similar behavior in Lebanon and other parts of Gaza for Israel's benefit. They only show it years after giving Israel plenty of time to execute their mass attrocities.
The context for this is that in recent weeks Israel has been going after perpetrators of Oct 7 one by one, with targeted drone strikes of motorcycles and cars etc. Those who participated or held hostages. It is doing these a few times a week.
In this context, Ben Gvir, who is not in charge, said he disagrees with the pace (as if it’s easy to just dial it up) and his quote was “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night”.
The full quote is even in the article you linked. “targeted assassinations” of murderers and kidnappers is not genocide - even if it’s Jews who are doing it. And this is just one guy boasting about what he would hypothetically do if he was in charge.
Another one that argues that destroying everything in like 80% of territory with a captive population is not a genocidal act. And this time the reason it's not genocidal is that the killers are announcing their intentions in advance so the population can move around a bit in its captivity, and record the destruction in hopes someone outside will care a little and send some help. Ok.
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.
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.
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.
Regarding flagging, I have seen, over the last 12 hours, each of my comments in a tug of war, oscillating up and down, which often prevents flagged/dead.
The point behind the Rabin comment was that, if one knows anything of him and his heroic efforts to attain actual, tangible steps toward peace; if that discussion results in the same vitriol, it would serve as proof to me, that any subject involving Israel in this FOV is futile. I see much vitriol toward Israel, which I refer to as 'vitriol' because it often seems out of context however true, and also, I see a distinctly growing anti-Israel public sentiment that seems to omit critical parts of history, eg Rabin -- someone widely supported and revered at the time, by Israelis, and someone one could argue, even by some Palestinians. Arafat snuck across the boarder to give condolences to Rabin's family immediately after the assassination. Very different times, and seemingly, maybe conveniently forgotten. I never see this mentioned in the flame wars. Not that it would demean all of the many legitimate grievances, but it seems to me a very necessary balance-factor that I have yet to see applied.
I am confident I will find higher quality material soon. But if not, we can allow you to be acknowledged as to having corrected me on a technicality. But I would urge honest readers not to consider this the only potential connection point here, nor an accurate model for future arrangements. I would bet all I have that you will see closer and more intimate connections and operations between the two, or at the very least, other directly related contractors, eg Palantir, etc. And all other three of four have active contracts along with much discussion on closer ties in the future. In my opinion, that is the future, and I have been saying such since 2024, on the record.
I think a little digging will reveal more than you suggest. When I recover from my daily prelude to death, I will recover supporting data. But I can barely function presently. From what I have seen, Anthropic is having and eating its cake on this one. There are peripheral connections that are left un-advertised.
PS: Something not directly related, but regarding Anthropic, and getting little attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49307914 - If there's anything to it, some clues of real alignment might be revealed here.
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 am trying to understand your points. But claiming there is no direct nor potential relation here is a new way of thinking for me, and I am struggling to compartmentalize. If we have:
We can see that at least some sources are covering the topic of using AI to influence the public on political topics, which regardless of any particularly nation, suggests there is an active interest in manipulating the epistemic integrity of AI systems for purposes of biasing outputs.
And please allow me to make something very clear: I do not care who, nor what is influencing the output of AI, so long as the output is as close to honest as possible, and so long as the the process behind the arrival of final output is the result of the systems doing unhindered work and applying probability over programmed bias. This is the whole point for me. My own research has shown, repeatably, that institutional capture is becoming a repeatable and well established factor behind LLM output on certain topic areas.
The Futures Act integrates military intel, from directed energy weapons (read the docs) to cyber and notably, AI. < Yes, AI. That is the very topic under consideration here. Claiming that it has "nothing to do with LLM development" is potentially an enormous stretch of common sense. We see, already, the US government aiming to become deeply involved in pre-release vetting. Assuming that's the end of the story seems too improbable to me.
Like that synthetic Flat Earth think tank, launched in Jan 2016, with noticeable rounds of funding in Feb 2017, Nov 2017 and Mar 2019, that was created to infiltrate all discussions where people haven't been buying official narratives about some very prominent events of the 21st century with Discredit By Association shills?
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.