Experts who study communication online say the widespread use of such tools influences the online discussion of the war and is ushering in a new era of citizen-led propaganda campaigns. But the use of the tools does not appear to violate platform rules against what’s known as “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” or posts that appear to come from unrelated individuals but are really the result of an organized effort, often through automated accounts.
“Working in an orchestrated fashion can be violative, but it quickly becomes a gray area, and that’s why these apps exist,” said Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press, a nonpartisan organization that lists its goals as protecting free expression and civil liberties.
Researchers say it is difficult to determine which comments have been generated by such tools because there’s no way to publicly track a user’s private activity across multiple apps. Social media companies would have to come up with ways to detect their use, which is challenging because the apps operate on their own platforms, not those of the social media companies. If the apps were automatically posting, they would likely violate rules against inauthentic activity. But third-party apps that simply encourage legitimate users to report posts escape that sanction.
There’s also no way to know with precision that actions taken against someone’s account or posts are in response to activity from these apps. Anecdotally, some users report that after their Instagram and TikTok posts were mentioned on the apps, the posts were either removed or heavily downranked, making them less accessible to a large audience.
Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, did not respond to a request for comment. TikTok also did not respond to requests for comment.
“I’ve had many posts taken down, I’d say upwards of 15 to 20 posts removed,” said Nys, a content creator who posts on TikTok under the handle @palestinianpr1ncess and spoke on the condition that she be referred to by first name only because she’s worried about repercussions when traveling to the West Bank. Nys said that each of her posts that has been surfaced on one of the apps has received a flood of pro-Israel, seemingly AI-generated comments. The post is also usually removed after many users report it for bullying or hate speech. “I’m not using hate speech,” Nys said. “I’m just doing commentary on everything happening in Palestine.”
Laura Chung, a content creator and podcaster, said that she believes a mass reporting campaign facilitated by one of the apps is what led to her TikTok account being removed in December. “I was creating pro-Palestine content for education purposes and I was going massively viral,” she said. “I believe it’s these apps that got me banned on TikTok.”
Joan Donovan, a noted disinformation expert who is an assistant professor of journalism at Boston University, said the apps are a new development in the propaganda battle being waged on the internet over Israel’s offensive in Gaza and that social media companies need to find ways to monitor their use.
“Social media is a terrain of warfare, not just for cyber troops, but also for citizen battalions armed with AI-enhanced bots and the ability to generate endless unique posts that evade current content moderation tools,” she said. “It is incumbent on tech companies to defend against such abuses.”
“This level of organization only exists on one side of the conflict,” said Emerson T. Brooking, a former cyber policy adviser to the Defense Department who studies disinformation and propaganda campaigns as a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “It exists for pro-Israel voices, and it exists because there are government ministries in Israel that support these tools and encourage their use.”
Brooking and other experts said they aren’t aware of any similar tools for Palestinian supporters.
At least one of these apps is directly tied to Israel. The app, called Moovers, encourages users to “Advocate for Israel, One Click at a Time.” It pulls in allegedly pro-Palestinian content from Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and X in a never-ending feed, allowing users easily to take action on that content, reporting it for review or commenting on it. It also provides pre-written pro-Israel scripts to respond to such posts.
In early December, a representative from Leaders, a Tel Aviv-based Israeli influencer marketing firm, began contacting creators in the United States, offering to pay them to promote Moovers to their audiences on Instagram. In emails viewed by The Washington Post, a representative from Leaders touted content on the Moovers app as “endorsed by Israel’s Government Advertising Agency.”
Words of Iron, another pro-Israel app, functions almost identically. It claims to surface anti-Israel posts collected by a team of social media experts and offers to “boost Israel’s voice on social media with a single click.” The app also provides “progress reports” to users with a daily progress bar, gamifying the experience and encouraging users to engage more.
What these tools categorize as anti-Israel content is broad and unclear. Several posts surfaced by Words of Iron featured content creators discussing news reports of a Palestinian teenager who was allegedly sexually assaulted while in Israeli custody, for example. Another post encouraged users of the app to mass report a post from influencer and lawyer Rosy Pirani, who posted on Christmas Day that Jesus was Palestinian.
Pirani said she didn’t know how many times the flagging of her post caused it to be reported to Instagram. Instagram does not share that information. But her posts no longer are being recommended to non-followers, her content is banned from the Explore page and the Reels tab, and she is no longer allowed to monetize her posts, she said. “It’s sad to see content that’s in no way antisemitic being reported,” Pirani said. “Sites like Words of Iron are scaring other content creators from posting about Palestine. They’re chilling free speech, and that’s what they aim to do.”
Some of the content the tool surfaces isn’t specifically anti-Israel, but is antisemitic. For instance, the website surfaced posts made by content creator Lucas Gage, who was suspended from X after making antisemitic comments.
Project Truth, another web tool, allows users to post the text of any tweet deemed critical of Israel and receive a pre-written “fact check” response to copy and paste online.
In response to a post on X by Ayman Mohyeldin, an MSNBC host, quoting Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh bemoaning what he said was “the lack of sufficient support from Western journalists and press organizations” for Palestinian journalists, Project Truth suggested this response: “Hamas uses human shields, making conflict zones chaotic. Israel warned civilians to evacuate. When Hamas endangers its own, silence on that is the real issue. Where’s the outrage for their methods? #HamasHumanShields #SelectiveOutrage #IsraelUnderAttack.”
The apps’ impact on the perception of the war online is undeniable, Benavidez said.
“These tools upend authenticity and they make it harder for people to understand what’s happening on their feeds and recognize when content is real, recognize real interactions, and to feel that there is integrity on their feeds,” she said. “People who see [pro-Israel] content in their feeds and don’t understand that it originates from automated tools may feel like the language is indicative of a growing sentiment, and that can then shift their attitudes.”
The Atlantic Council’s Brooking said such tools and tactics aren’t new, but the way Israel involves the public in using them is different from how other nations have used similar tools. “These apps are targeting American speech and trying to enlist American users,” he said. “This level of organization and the fact that it takes place in the open is novel.”
It’s impossible to know how many users each of the apps has, and new apps have cropped up. They are shared primarily among private Facebook and WhatsApp groups that coordinate responses to accounts deemed critical of Israel.
Ameer Al-Khatahtbeh, a Muslim journalist and founder of the independent media company that operates the Instagram handles @Muslim and @Muslimnews, with a collective 6 million followers on Instagram alone, said he suspects the apps have been used to target his posts.
“As soon as we post something, messages that seem like bots flood the comments within the first 10 minutes,” Al-Khatahtbeh said, noting that his followers are unlikely to be the source of the comments. “We’re dealing with account-deletion warnings on a daily basis,” he said, describing an environment where he is “walking on eggshells” not to violate websites’ community guidelines.
Leslie Priscilla, a content creator who runs the Instagram account @Latinxparenting, with almost 200,000 followers, said she has altered language in the captions of her posts to avoid detection by the apps. Instead of writing “Palestine,” she uses the watermelon emoji, and instead of writing “Gaza,” she writes “G@z@.”
Even though the tools allow the organized targeting of posts, they do not violate platforms’ terms of service, which generally allow the copying and pasting of content and the manual reporting of content for review.
Donovan, of Boston University, called on tech companies to develop rules to defend against such tools. “Citizen-led propaganda campaigns are here to stay, which is why technology companies must push forward plans to universally boost reputable news sources to foster an informed public,” she said. “Anything less than that makes them complicit.”
Israel, whose $82 billion tech industry is considered a global leader in technology developments, has worked for years to shape online discussion of its policies.
In 2017, Gilad Erdan, then Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, introduced an online campaign, called 4IL (“For Israel”), to bolster support of Israel across social media. Act.IL allowed users to easily respond to any social media post deemed too critical of Israel, or too pro-Palestinian. It was billed as “a one-stop digital shop designed to provide tools for activists to promote Israel and delegitimize the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement,” according to +972 magazine, an Israeli news outlet (the name is a reference to Israel’s international long distance dialing code).
Act.IL shut down in 2022.
“At a time when journalist are being killed and their families are being erased, and a media blackout is pervading in Gaza,” said Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a freelance journalist with 1.1 million Instagram followers who’s been covering the conflict, “it’s really scary that these services can contribute to the silencing of anyone trying to document, advocate or use their voice.”
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