Fake US thinktank set up and funded by Israel sought to game AI for propaganda

In effort to prime chatbots to make pro-Israel arguments the site published 124 reports, over 560,000 words in nine days, Guardian analysis shows

A pro-Israel messaging website badged with the name of a thinktank that does not exist has published more than half a million words in nine days, built on a commercial platform that promises to optimize content so that AI chatbots will cite it.

The site gives Israel’s position on subjects including the torture of Palestinian prisoners, Israeli war crimes and whether Israel has deliberately starved Palestinians in Gaza, all presented as neutral research.

The New York media production company Piro Inc filed the site with the US justice department this month under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara), a 1938 law that requires anyone working for a foreign government to formally disclose it, as material it distributes for the Israeli government.

The site publishes in the name of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, which apparently does not exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no physical address, and carries no named staff and no bylines on any of its reports. Its own terms of use are governed by the laws of “the state in which the Institute is established”, which they decline to name.

The existence of the site was first reported on 14 August. Since then the institute has added a page headed funding, which states: “An earlier version of this page said the Institute operated without external funding, and that was true when it was written.”

The site is one part of a broader effort, financed by tens of millions of dollars from the Israeli government and routed through third parties including the European advertising group Havas Media, to prime chatbots to make Israel’s arguments for it. A contract between Havas and another American firm working on the campaign commits it to the “deployment of websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations”.

The Guardian contacted Piro Inc, Havas Media and the Israeli government advertising agency LaPam for comment. Comment was also sought via a contact email address published on the Hanover Institute website.

It comes at a point when Israel’s standing in US public opinion has collapsed, and when Israeli officials have begun briefing media outlets that money spent on so-called “Hasbara” efforts at public diplomacy overseas has been wasted.

According to a Guardian analysis, between 6 and 14 August the Hanover Institute published 124 reports totaling more than 560,000 words, an average of about 4,500 words each. On 12 and 13 August alone it produced 73 reports, amounting to almost 354,000 words in two days. Nothing has been published since the first reports about the Hanover Institute.

All but one of the 124 headlines on the website opens with a question resembling one that a user might type into a chatbot, including “Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism?”, “Did Israel Expel Palestinians From Their Land?”, “Is Israel Carrying Out a Genocide in Gaza?”

The reports are presented in a quasi-academic manner and are punctiliously sourced, with citations including the World Bank, UN agencies, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Amnesty International and the text of the Genocide Convention.

Nick Cleveland-Stout, a research associate at the Quincy Institute who has reported on the site, told the Guardian that his first impression was of something impressive. “It succeeds in masquerading as very academic – the website design, the logos, everything just looks good. But the more you read it, you’re able to realise that a lot of it makes no sense.”

For example, the information the Hanover Institute site presents is persistently framed to blunt criticism of Israel. Where human rights organisations have concluded that Israel is committing genocide or apartheid, the reports reliably observe that no court has entered a verdict on the claim – a formulation that appears in 20 of the 124 reports according to the Guardian’s count.

Casualty and aid figures are attributed to “a party to the events”, a caveat used in 55 reports and applied to Israel’s own counts as readily as to Palestinian ones. The reader is left with the impression that little about Gaza can be established.

Source: Read the original article on www.theguardian.com