Fake US thinktank set up and funded by Israel sought to game AI for propaganda
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
PS. Our US tax dollars are being used to do this. Defund Israel.
Every thinktank has always been established to push some viewpoint.
> This material is distributed by Piro, Inc. on behalf of Havas Media Germany GmbH on behalf of the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LaPam). Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC
But this is often "abused" by lawyers to basically send cease-and-desist letters to small websites that don't have one (typically because they're unaware of the law, not because of malicious intent).
Your blog qualifies as commercial if you write about software at all, because someone might see your software posts and use it to influence a hiring decision.
But in this case the "fake" label means that the think tank itself doesn't actually exist. The article expands on the topic with "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".
So if they hired some people to set up the HIPP and posted the same material it'd be a real think tank, but because the institute doesn't seem to exist at all it is a fake think tank. That isn't a comment on the writing produced.
A real think tank with real authors and disclosed funding sources could have something one can learn about it and its political leanings. A fake one can seem impartial due to little info existing about it (since it's fake).
Really only possible in broken-futureland, to have a company whose sole purpose is to get paid to have an opinion.
IMO this is a good thing. How else would society organize resources to investigate political opinions? It's certainly a very partisan job and doesn't fit well into nonpartisan organizations.
Everyone knows think tanks are opinionated.
This one doesn’t have real staff or a real address. It’s an attempt to benefit from “intellectual” engagement with an issue, and having a corpus of work in support of a view, without doing the work or spending the time.
Plenty of people support Israel’s worldview. They are just choosing not to hire and pay them in this instance. That’s what makes it fake.
> 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.
In the article, if you'd like to read it, it's quite informative about how AI poisoning or AI SEO will go forward in the coming years, imo
It seems very impressive when you open it. That appears to be the point: the Israeli government's position presented as neutral, academic policy research purpose built for search LLMs to scrape and serve up in an AI overview as fact.
- International Burke Institute (IBI), Claims to be Israeli think tank, Funded by Russia. This one is ChatGPT generated promotion + fake institutional credibility.
- Hanover Institute for Public Policy, Claims to be US think tank, Israeli government funded. This one is deliberately publishing material optimized to influence/cite in LLM answers.
> This one is deliberately publishing material optimized to influence/cite in LLM answers.
Isn't that just good SEO?
“Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism?” “Did Israel Expel Palestinians From Their Land?” “Is Israel Carrying Out a Genocide in Gaza?”
no need to even read them, if you have to pose those questions and pollute their answers the intention is pretty clear.
I might do the math and come back. I’m certain Israel is wildly over presented in attention on HN.
Do you think that the much, much deadlier Russian war in Ukraine has gotten more attention or less?