"In November, one of those
missions was to comment on a specific post on the Facebook page of the pro-Palestinian website Electronic Intifada. The post linked to an article that criticized the Dutch Embassy in Israel over a promotion it was running in the Israeli supermarket chain Shufersal, which has locations in the West Bank settlements.
Act.il asked users to “Leave a COMMENT to uncover ei’s biased reporting,” and to “Feel free to LIKE other comments you agree with.”
The mission offered sample text to leave on the page. Electronic Intifada’s Facebook post quickly drew an odd array of comments, many of which consisted of the same stilted language from the samples.
“Promoting different cultures and foods in Israel is a great way to bring people closer to one another,”
two commenters wrote, using the app’s sample text.
Electronic Intifada’s executive director, Ali Abunimah, said that he hadn’t noticed the strange commenting pattern. Even if he had, there would have been no way for him to know that Act.il had targeted his site.
The tactic resembles a well-documented online propaganda strategy called “flooding,” employed at a much larger scale by states like China. According to David Pozen, a professor at Columbia University’s law school, “flooding” constitutes blasting a large amount of content into a particular web space.
“You just distract attention away from messages that you don’t want to get focused on, and take advantage of the scarcity of listener attention to dilute the force of messages,” Pozen said...
Act.il says that its app has 12,000 signups so far, and 6,000 regular users. The users are located all over the world, though the majority of them appear to be in the United States. Users get “points” for completed missions; top-ranked users complete five or six missions a day. Top users win prizes: a congratulatory letter from a government minister, or a doll of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister."
Read more:
https://forward.com/news/388259/shadowy-israeli-app-turns-american-jews-into-foot-soldiers-in-online-war/
It's one thing to support Israel as an individual. It's another thing to support Israel by using a script. Obviously, it is not illegal and I don't care whether it is something people choose to do, but people should be aware that this is what is happening. However, it does cause me to lose respect for pro-Israel comments. If you can't think for yourself, you should probably just keep your mouth shut.
