IDF Forces in Gaza (credit IDF)
The Israeli government engaged in an “ FAKE influence” campaign that targeted different American members of Congress using fake social media accounts, reported the New York Times. Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs engaged in the campaign in an effort to sway certain lawmakers into supporting Israel in its “Iron Swords” War against the Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza.
The campaign used OpenAI’s ChatGPT service. The Times cited four anonymous sources at the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which maintains relations between Israel and Jewish communities around the world, as confirming this.
According to the report, the Ministry began its campaign last October after the October 7 Hamas massacre. The campaign relied on a number of fake user accounts on the social media platform “X,” formerly known as Twitter. Hundreds of fake user accounts were also created on other social media services like Facebook and Instagram that were used to post pro-Israel comments.
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“The accounts focused on U.S. lawmakers, particularly ones who are Black and Democrats, such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader from New York, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, with posts urging them to continue funding Israel’s military,” said the New York Times.
This is the first such campaign carried out by Israel to influence lawmakers in the US.
“Israel’s role in this is reckless and probably ineffective,” Achiya Schatz, the executive director of FakeReporter, told the New York Times. That Israel “ran an operation that interferes in U.S. politics is extremely irresponsible.”
The news comes just days after OpenAI said it foiled attempts by the Israeli political campaign firm Stoic to use its ChatGPT AI service to engage in “influence” campaigns with artificially generated content spread around the Internet. This was just one of five firms engaging in such activity around the world, with the others coming from Iran China and two from Russia.
The company dubbed the operation by Stoic “Zero Zeno,” for the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy. The people behind Zero Zeno used OpenAI’s models to generate articles and comments that were then posted across multiple platforms, notably Instagram, Facebook, X, and websites associated with this operation.
According to the report, many of the social-media accounts that posted this network’s content used profile pictures that “appear to have been created using an earlier type of artificial intelligence: generative adversarial networks (GAN).” Such images can be readily downloaded from the internet.
