Not really. A while ago there was a news piece stating that Israel was behind a series of fake think-tanks with very accessible websites which were created with the express purpose of feeding AI agents with alternative facts aligned with their foreign policy.
If anyone has the link at hand, please post it.
Past HN discussions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337392 (884 comments)
Anyway, my issue with them is that they love to derail every debate on the internet by injecting their personal gripes regarding the conflict.
Sure, there are a bunch of morons on the Zionist side as well, but in general, barely anyone spams about the topic on Mamdani related news for example.
In a thread about the conflict, yeah, debating the conflict is on topic. But in a thread that has zero business dealing with the conflict at all and just casually mentions a company that happens to be active in Israel? Now that is (for me) pure derailing.
Israel themselves seem pretty settled on it:
https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20260902-israel-orga...
Especially the ultraorthodox crowd is going to get hit hard, the rest of Israel is extremely pissed off at them due to their insistence on not having to serve in the military.
And let me be clear: all of those currently in power in Israel deserve a court trial and a lengthy prison term for incitement of racial hatred, and everyone in charge of the military and police a war crimes investigation.
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/09/02/i...
Your degree if denialism is really impressive. You dismiss, the mass killings, the push to erase a nation, and you even dismiss representatives outright admitting and acknowledging doing it.
Where exactly do you place the bar that would lead you to say "Yes, Israel is committing genocide".
At the very least you’d expect the population being genocided to decline.
Palestinian population growth has been exponential throughout Israel’s history (if you’re one of those who claim the “genocide” started a long time ago), and even the population of Gaza has not declined after 3 years of war (reported births are still more than reported deaths).
Imagine being a European in 1940 and claiming there’s no genocide against the Jews because "at the very least you’d expect the population being genocided to decline" (at that point "only" around 100,000 had been killed).
The total killed in Gaza in 2026 is about 920 (mostly targeted attacks of individuals who participated in the Oct 7 massacre).
People with an axe to grind or states with an agenda are already devoting tremendous effort toward affecting LLM models and it is very difficult to determine real from astroturf for humans let alone an LLM trying to train.
Much like PageRank now that the cat's out of the bag all the current approaches may prove to be useless in the long run.
The internet is uniquely devoid of consequences (esp. reputational consequences, social faux pas, etc.) and makes effort expenditure minimal. So you get lots of bad behavior.
I think "ads vs not ads" is maybe the wrong way to model it. Ultimately people are just doing what benefits themselves across every dimension possible.
But you're right, I think that's what they meant.
It is already legal for companies not to do any marketing.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank...
Let’s please not revive that term, it has done enough harm. From its inception, it has just been a way to make falsehoods sounds legitimate. Even the person who came up with it seemed to be swallowing a whole toad while speaking it for the first time.