I suspect that this kind of tactic is going to be everywhere in a year or so. Entire fake personalities and organization websites on the Internet created just to push a narrative or to advertise a product, which completely drown out real information.
At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
If that happens, then in turn AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information, and said authority websites can use their privileged position to charge for access of their data.
It's already been happening for a very long time. The US' "Operation Earnest Voice" happened in 2010/2011[0]
And it's not just state actors. Anyone who was online during the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trials was likely inundated with media about that trial. Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
All threads that have... certain keywords... are like this. Talk about meta. Looks like I'm now in the positive (+5) after being in the negative just a moment ago.
Anyways, I got really interested in this topic around mid 2010s because of some really interesting reporting by Codastory[0] covering Russian "troll factories" especially used to influence opinion in eastern Ukraine, but also in many other circumstances. In Houston in 2016, Russian troll accounts planned both an ANTI Muslim rally AND a counterprotest to that rally all on Facebook.[1] Hundreds of real human beings showed up!
Russia got a ton of attention for their use of troll farms but the truth is that the US and certain allies have actually been using stuff like this for far longer and, imo, with much more success. In fact, Coda Story itself is funded by the NED which is a massive pillar of global US, uh, "soft power".
Sama saw this coming a decade away, which is why he invested in Worldcoin (now World). At some point people (and agents) will be clamoring for human verification at the speed of technology.
I'm not a fan of World, but this is a portent of things to come. Spread the disease, sell the cure as they say.
Propaganda is not a new thing. It might look slightly different on the internet, but it doesn't look that different. Creating organizations to push a narrative was just as much a thing 100 years ago as it is now.
IIRC the first or second chapter of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) talks about sophisticated influence campaigns in the fashion industry. Conscripting "influencers" to induce demand, and so on. As you said, literally 100 years ago.
Of course they are. It’s everywhere, especially thr online retailers these days. [1]
Thankfully the resources at our local libraries are a) selected by a combination of librarian curation and public demand, b) often published before 2022, c) heavy things printed on paper or stored in a database and unlikely to suddenly change their content or disappear overnight when a new news cycle breaks.
Written works aren’t necessarily credible even if they aren’t slop, but thanks to curators who care, our libraries are significantly less susceptible (although definitely not immune [2]) to ai slop, and propaganda and manipulation efforts than a search engine. The internet continues to enshittify, and truth becomes further eroded by this coming wave of ai enabled propaganda, we are going to have to turn somewhere if we want to find trustworthy resources. Personally, if it gets to the point that verifying sources from public search results becomes too hard with all the new misinformation and slop, I’ll start propritizing human curation over SEO and start visiting my local library’s website a lot more.
Right; the same mechanisms (curation, demand-driven economies of scale, library user demand) that largely stop niche self-published books from ever finding themselves in libraries (well, nationally in public libraries at least; they are often found in individual branches) work against pure slop books ever turning up.
Books where the author has successfully hoodwinked the publishing process into believing that AI generated text is their own, those will turn up, just as plagiarised books will.
It's so obvious when a book is generated by an LLM that I would blame the person buying the book moreso than I would the person who generated it for it. You can tell in a few sentences if something is AI generated (and by proxy - if it's worth reading or not).
I think using LLMs to research is completely fine, as long as authors would take the information and synthesize their own opinions based on the findings. I read books/articles/posts/comments to hear other PEOPLE's opinions, not LLM generated opinions.
Some nuances here. There’s a variety of different roadblocks at different levels that will work to prevent pure AI slop books ever turning up in a typical public library of physical printed works; I think they never will.
Probably a handful of books in such libraries already have some text in them where the author has tried to pass off fragments of LLM-generated prose as their own and have got that past editors, reviewers and publishers, and that will sadly get worse.
I know my library system at least won't be purchasing AI books. They have a pretty rigorous acquisition process for books and other media thanks to the "concern groups" who sprang up complaining about themes and content they didn't like in libraries. We did have in my state a rural school district figured out recently that their Texas-based reading and instructional materials are AI-slop but they at least figured it out before the school year began. It was unclear how these materials were approved but it apparently bypassed normal curricula approval.
Although comments below point out that this has been going on for a long time, I too think it will be geetting infinitely worse in the near future. Everyone will want their own poisoning factory.
One consequence is that one should be extra-wary when asking AI about current, controversial topics.
But another consequence is maybe that there will be a demand for models with an older cutoff, before generalized poisoning and slop?
> Qatar is spreading fake information and is funding Hamas as well as anti-Israel classes in major US colleges.
This is absolutely true but people don't want to hear about this. Qatar is the main propagator of many student bodies in the US. This is how you get students saying "gloabalize intifada", "death to the USA”, occupying buildings, etc.
Qatar has a long, well funded strategy for influence in the west which is pretty much their only leverage.
In addition they are the main funders of Hamas, alongside hosting the Hamas leaders in fancy hotels in Doha for many, many years.
Yeah but the Haredi will outbreed the rational liberals of Israel and vote towards extremism. If there was a Muslim country with as much power as Israel attacking other countries, it would equally be right to call it out.
Its a messy situation. Qatar hosted HAMAS's bot farms and leadership until 2024 (or 2025, I don't remember) when Israel destroyed it with literal bombs dropped by a F-35I. That happened quite near to both a Qatari military base and a US military base. That doesn't happen unless the Qatari military/government gave approval. I'm no expert in Qatari politics but I would guess that there are significant support for HAMAS in the population. The politicians probably wanted HAMAS leadership and IW operations out of their country, but they also wanted plausible deniability with their own population. So given all of that and assuming there are things happening we don't understand, is Qatar an enemy of Israel? Publicly the answer is no. But its probably also dependent on their respective interests and situationally independent.
what about not whatabouting facts? we are not talking about the miss universe contest here. keep your identity small, it will help you think more clearly.
>>When Obama used social networks, he was called a genius, but when it’s someone you don’t like
Obama used social networks to spread a milquetoast 'yes we can' message, not to justify an ongoing genocide. How is that even a comparison. Israel is closer to Triumph des Willens than it is to promoting the Affordable Care Act, you do realize that right?
It's not 'far from being a perfect state', it's waging old testament wars of extermination on its neighbors and towns
It has been attacked by a Palestinian militia terrorist group. Is it waging old testament wars? No, but it is retaliating at a rate the western world refuses to accept because the western world has different, much much milder kind of problems.
Foundation for Defense of Democracies is another Israeli think tank that poses as an American organization. If you see anything quoted from them realize it's fake propaganda in the service of a foreign country.
The fact you're posting this exact same comment multiple times, while ignoring that Ben Gvir was talking about Hamas, is telling.
I don't support Ben Gvir in the slightest but you're using something he said to twist the narrative, which ironically is exactly what the Hanover think-tank was supposedly meant to remedy.
> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister,” he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat — there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”
The man used to have a shrine to a mass murderer in his home.
> Ben-Gvir is known for being a provocateur and has attracted headlines for a variety of reasons: threatening Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on live television in 1995 shortly before his assassination; having had a portrait in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish terrorist and mass murderer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacr...)...
Trump just recently said he’s considering attacking Oman.
Politicians say really terrible, stupid things on a fairly regular basis. The difference between the two situations is that Ben-Gvir is loathed by 90% of Israeli society (Trump still has 33% approval) and unlike Trump has no power to follow through on his threats.[1]
Yes, he is totally powerless, he merely controls the police and prison system. (BTW, the Israeli government just announced it plans to transfer law enforcement in the West Bank over to Ben-Gvir's police: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/14/israeli-milita...)
It’s an injunction and arguably a legal pretext to stop it in its tracks. That’s not uncommon in any system, just like SCOTUS rulings often seem strangely specific to restrain the scope of their ruling.
Tl;dr Lawfare is a thing and it’s effing everywhere.
I have a long-held feeling with Trump that his most ardent haters don't hate his specific policies, merely that he's so gauche about it, that he has no class.
I have no doubt that Ben-Gvir has a similar segment of haters in Israel. They want the same things, but they don't want to do it in the style of a leering hooligan fishing for a fistfight.
I'll say this a third time. And the importance of this article is not the method. It is the motive. Using AI to whitewash war crimes is not cool at all.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly.
On television.
So it is both hilarious and disturbing that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like the aforementioned is out in the open for everyone to witness.
What does it means to be a "fake" think tank? 80% of think tanks are already propaganda vehicles. A low end think tank is basically a pretentious blog.
presumably that you don't have employees that do any of the proverbial thinking, which is the case here.
Every think tank has its biases and funding sources but something like RAND is an actual entity at which people do research, this "Hanover Public Policy Institute" has nothing to do with Hanover, policy and isn't an institute, but a deliberately misleadingly presenting arm of the Israeli government proxied through a German advertising company
I find intensive marketing/PR efforts are often inversely correlated with the claims being made - whether it's products or geopolitics. Israel certainly engages in very intense marketing on certain fronts, but truth cannot be obscured forever. In Physics the law of conservation includes not only matter and energy, but also information (Information cannot be destroyed from the Universe).
I've also found this to be true, but also only in relatively modern times. For instance during the Cold War there was an obscene amount of propaganda, but it was mostly true. For instance the wide array of cheap affordable goods in American shelves was constantly flaunted, but not in the least bit misleading.
I don't understand the modern effort to engage in 'information warfare' as a thing in and of itself. Each time it collapses and people sees what was 'really' happening, it just makes them that much less likely to believe you next time. And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth. Countless politicians have proudly paraded around their pristine, seemingly untouched, copies of Meditations, but perhaps they should go for more foundational works, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
One goal of modern propaganda is to make it irrelevant when the truth inevitably comes out.
Look at the US situation. It’s clear that Trump is a rapist - the truth has come out. It’s clear he’s corrupt. For all the “release the full Epstein files” discussion, it really wouldn’t change anything.
The truth will come out but will the people who can make it matter be listening?
Apart from the ethical implications this is reckless in the extreme if you take into account the recent advances in AI. Putting misinformation out there like that doesn't just have to fool existing LLMs but also all of the LLMs to come in the future.
If you look at the mathematical achievements of frontier models recently, their strength has been to bring in information from a vast array of sources and to consider them within the context of each other.
I anticipate that it won't be long before this ability to look into every nook and cranny with be able to identify academic fraud. Identifying every piece of academic fraud to date would probably come soon after.
It wouldn't take much to extend that ability to identify deliberate misinformation. That's in the future, but it looms close enough on the horizon that you would have to be a fool to create an evidence record like this in and attempt to trick the models of today.
well on one side you have huge military on other side you have a pile of rocks that used to be a city. so comparing these its does not make israel look better.
I dont care about making Isreal look good. I'm just pointing out that both sides use violent rhetoric because as you can see from this thread people did not know. I think sometimes people forget that the war was started intentionally with full knowledge what would happen.
Palestinians aren't claiming to be the only democracy in the Middle East and all that shit.
If individual Israelis want to claim they're not monsters, what Palestinians do or doesn't do doesn't enter into it, only the actions and deeds ( or lack thereof) of the Israelis in question do, and how that meets or fails to meet specific standards of morality. The same goes for Palestinians.
> I think sometimes people forget that the war was started intentionally with full knowledge what would happen.
So, collective punishment. Don't bother about the "violent rhetoric" of any "sides", deal with what you just said and what that says about you.
Well you can both sides it all you want but european zionists are invaders that have been stealing land since the 40s and palestinians are the ones being invaded and robbed. I promise you Americans would be saying crazy shit if someone invaded and occupied their land.
I never thought I'd see this kind of blatant anti-semitism on HN.
Jews in Europe were persecuted for hundreds of years as foreign invaders told to go back to their homeland. Immediately after the Holocaust, we realized it was time to return to our own country; we could not rely on the kindness of European nations.
And now that we have returned, we're labelled invaders of our own nation, our historic homeland of 3,500 years. But Jews have been in Jerusalem longer than the British have been in London. We built Tel Aviv from a desert into a modern city. We rebuilt Jerusalem and opened it up to Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
It's wild historic revisionism to claim Jews are stealing Arab lands. There are over 30 Muslim- and Arab-majority nations. There is only a single Jewish nation: our historic, 3,500 year old homeland: Israel.
People are responsible for their actions, and big, racist buckets labelled "Jews" and "Arabs" are meaningless.
Might as well say "humans always lived here, I'm a human, so it's my land now". If this is the level of thought these crimes are defended with, oh boy.
"Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas" —Benjamin Netanyahu
Wasn't Hamas technically funded by Natanyahu for the explicit goal of dividing Palestinian leadership and to ensure that extremists had both money and power so that he always had justification to wipe out Palestine ?
Look at how evil this group is -> genocide of their entire state is good! (Don't look at the fact that I demanded that this group is explicitly funded - that is not important)
“Heh, we’re fucking awful, but check out what THOSE GUYS (who aren’t a first world country with international relationships and funding, i.e. where upholding a similar standard is laughable) are doing”
"We will repeat oct 7 over and over until Isreal is destroyed" and Hamad still supports that statement and maintains that Oct 7th was good and violence against Isreal is always justified.
Anyone resisting ethnic cleansing is a "terrorist", and so is anyone that happens to be standing next to them, as well as their nearest kin. We know the playbook.
All four frontier models have active contracts with the Pentagon.
And some might say, that alone means little.
But when you take into consideration the implications of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, whether one endorses it or not, the effects of that mentioned in TFA become quite formidable, and plausibly official.
Edit: I see this comment got immediately flagged. Is there any point of debate here? Instead of disappearing the comment/data, maybe enlighten me, or assuage my concerns. Section 219 was objectively unprecedented in what it seeks to accomplish. Can it not be taken for granted that it would aid such efforts as the article cites? If not, explain.
You're right to ask these questions, unfortunately Hacker News seems pretty botted these days, and it doesn't help that there are a lot of shitty, racist people on this site. They just dress it up in nicer language.
Yeah, I am reading the comments, and looking at the title of the post, and seeing that folks really bend the rules on this 'particular' subject, which ironically serves as self censorship. Call me a fool for thinking even this subject could be cleanly discussed on HN.
I wonder if the same thing would happen if someone posted something on Yitzhak Rabin. I suppose that could be a test to prove whether some topics truly just cannot be discussed.
The FUTURES act has nothing to do with LLM development. You’re not being censored, we can read your posts. I generally agree with your views and right to ask questions, but you’re clearly not being censored and all you’ve presented is that a bunch of separate entities all connect to the US gov’t. Even if we assume all of them are connected, it would clash with the facts we’re discussing, namely, why would Israel bother contracting with marketing firms to post AI generated slop for AI to read?
State-sponsored propaganda apparatus masquerading as marketing optimization to influence LLMs is the most America-coded clandestine dystopian way of repatriating US taxpayer defense dollars with R&D deductions for the private sector.
It's been about 20 years since I read Neal Stephenson's Anathem and (SPOILERS) one thing I think about is the Reticulum, which is the Internet on this world. One aspect is that it's full of what we would now call slop. A lot of it is subtly changed by agents and there are other agents you can use (and, I assume purchase?) that will weed out the fake information. It's basically an arms race of disinformation and slop.
I've thought about this many times over the years. I think we've now reached the point where that's going to happen. And state actors seem like the obvious first offenders.
Google is relatively good at filtering out astroturfed pages from the top of search results but they've also have years when a Turkish government page denying the Armenian genocide was the top result for that event so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Google relies a lot on authority of a domain and that's been relatively effective.
It seems like this authority concept is missing from LLM training and a random comment on Reddit is treated with as much authority as an article by the New York Times. So it's now orders of magnitude easier to poison LLMs with Reddit comments and submissions. And for anyone who doesn't know, brigading Reddit is remarkably easy. It takes as little as a few hundred accounts to get something onto r/all if you're clever. Israeli hasbara operations are absolutely capable of this. And they engage in it.
I'm also reminded in a weird way of pre-atomic steel. For anyone who doesn't know, this is steel made before 1945 that is incredibly low in radiation because we hadn't detonated any nuclear bombs yet. It's valuable for making MRIs and the like that are super sensitive. We actually go and recover WW2 shipwrecks just for the steel. It is a finite resource.
Well, that's what pre-2022 written content is now. It's slop-free content to train AI models on because training them on AI slop is of much more limited value. This goes for everything from books to Youtube videos to Reddit posts. Just like pre-atomic steel, we now have pre-slop human content.
I hate to break it to you. But it took war'ing state-like actors less than a week to start using LLMs for propaganda purposes. There are pictures that most of what some people think/thought were real that never happened. Pictures that form their opinion on political topics. It was literally instantaneous. It was also remarkably predictable in almost all ways...sigh. Even the topics were predictable. And most people predictably fell for it, even the majority of the posters on this very site.
The comparison to pre-atomic steel is poignant. I have found myself preferring pre-AI sources in some cases even (especially?) for computer related information. It is difficult to view pre-slop info as a limited resource without implying decline until the status quo changes again.
It's not dang, it's just a bunch of users flagging things. Most of the time, if you email them (no such thing as a ping like @dang), they will actually turn off flagging for a post. Especially if there's a clear technological aspect like this
I have been reading your comments for a decade here on HN. You are no moron. But I can see you lean toward a side here. Can you, if willing, view my flagged comment and correct me. If anyone can around here, you'd be a top contender. This is not bait. I am open minded. And I am also seriously concerned about 219, which is now 1217. I might not have to ask if the subject were discussed here or elsewhere, but it isn't. All I have is my own interpretation to rely on so far.
it's just not a good faith comment. I did a few minutes of digging into their main claim, that a website called responsiblestatecraft.org is some kind of foreign-funded anti-American think-tank and found absolutely zero evidence of this
that site itself is a product of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft which began life with funding from both Koch and Soros Foundations [0] along with donations from other fairly large and common American foundations like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. so for one, you have money coming from someone who survived the Holocaust that's funding a supposedly anti-Semitic site. and for two, you don't get across-the-board grants from extremely well-funded and tightly controlled givers like these without both connections within the American political establishment and the ability to stand up to donor audits, both things that a weak-on-soft-power nation state would be incapable of pulling off
so I don't think you're going to convince them with actual evidence. when you've been propagandized to your entire life and stake your entire identity around some popular belief even the mildest criticism will feel like a deep attack. it's the same for any other dogmatist, whether it's a Patriot's fan or a religious zealot
is that how ben-gvir defines terrorist? as part of them being fanatic morons i wouldnt trust they share that definition. iirc theyve also talked about wanting to kill children because theyll grow up to be terrorists?
> ""מה עם להיות יותר התקפי? למה לא להוריד את כל החמושים בהלוויות? תוריד כמה פעמים באוויר בהלוויות. מדוע לא מעלים מסוק לאוויר והורגים 40-30 מחבלים?". שרת התחבורה מירי רגב הצטרפה לבן גביר ואמרה: "זה רעיון מצוין"."
> Ben-Gvir wondered: “What about being more offensive? Why not take all the gunmen off at funerals? Take a few times off at the air at funerals. Why don’t you put a helicopter in the air and kill 40-30 terrorists?” Transport Minister Miri Regev joined Ben-Gvir and said: "This is a great idea."
> The Chief of Staff replied: “We are doing a lot of offensive operations. Collecting weapons. I have a little more military experience than you. When the IDF goes to the heart of a refugee camp every night, it's an attack, not a defense. There aren't many armies that can lift such operations. The IDF is acting offensively and distinctly. In a crowded environment you need to know who you kill and who you don't. We've often entered funerals, weddings and birthdays, we do it professionally. When we kill those we should kill and not kill innocent people.”
> However, it seems that the Chief of Staff’s response did not satisfy Ben-Gvir, who answered: “This attack is to kill terrorists in masses. You have great opportunities at funerals that they come and not take advantage of.”
Kagi and Google give similar translations. The provided quote seems to be the first paragraph in this translation. More context in the article.
Yeah, sorry- it's a repeating theme from Ben Gvir and he made multiple similar mentions. He is asking the military to go aggressively after gunmen both in the west bank and in Gaza. Most recently in came up in a podcast hosted by someone who was held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. My initial quote was sort of random and possibly not what the OP was referring to. But the message is sort of repeating/the same. My beef is that these things are not really reported accurately and some (very limited but still) nuance is lost and then the new report turns into the truth (and often expands beyond the random opinion of one fanatic who is unfortunately in the Israeli government). We even see the statements get assigned to other, re-interpreted, as they make their rounds on the Internet.
I think "helicopters to attack funerals" is really not the correct interpretation of the original statement. Funerals for Hamas members often include massive amounts of armed combatants. The (dumb maybe) point is to go after those combatants. And yes, there is a potential risk for other people to get hurt which is why Israel does not tend to do this... and Ben Gvir would like Israel to still do it. But the target and the scenario are important and the new cycle turns this into "kill random people for the fun of it".
So to bring this back to influencing "AI" chatbots presumably the inaccurate/biased reporting is going to dominate over this "Hanover Institute" articles plus ofcourse responsiblestatecraft.org a left leaning organization is doing their own influencing. There are many who are doing their own form of influencing on people and AI chatbots.
Knowing that smotrich and ben gvir are fanatical morons, do you think that when they are referring to terrorists, they in fact dont mean any and all Palestinians? I dont think these guys differentiate between the two, especially when they speak in Hebrew.
You're not going to believe me but they do see that difference. That's not to say there's no hate or racism towards the average non-combatant ... but they definitely do not mean "all Palestinians" when they say "terrorist" in this specific context. Again, not that they have any love for the non-combatants but they are referring specifically to combatants/members of the specific organizations.
You are bent on defending the morons. And want to defame the media which correctly took his “kill 30-40 every night” to mean every random person. You say “believe me he means terrorists” but none of his actions actually speak to treating Palestinians differently. He made no calls to end starvation. He wants the Palestinians to leave. Both want to make life for Palestinians unbearable.
It is obvious that if he was misquoted he would have definitely corrected his statement. But he wants the army to hear his words in a confusing manner. And you are on his side when you are defending him and trying to sow doubt in how his words sound.
Generally the Israeli extreme right wants Palestinians to be removed/expelled from Gaza and most or all of the West Bank. I seriously doubt you will find an explicit call from them to murder civilians. Yes there were calls for siege to force surrender. There are calls to conquer all of Gaza. There were calls to completely destroy Gaza. There's definitely a lot of "All Gazans are responsible for the attack on Israel." But you are not going to find an explicit call to go and murder civilians and the Israeli far right doesn't think that way. What you will find is disregard to civilian casualties that are "collateral" damage.
I'm pretty sure that for both Ben Gvir and Smotrich having dozens of civilians killed when the target is a combatant is justified but intentionally attacking dozens of civilians when there is no combatant is not. They also do not represent the official government position though presumably their voters (something like 5% maybe of the public) would also hold similar opinions. They are also religious so they view a lot of this and their morality through a religious lens which I don't fully understand.
Not to compare but Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups have and do intentionally call for and attack Israeli civilians and the presence of a "military" target is not a factor. They prefer to go after civilians. They are also not that "extreme" in the public opinion. Their religious lens is also quite different.
Also yes, Israel has ended up killing a lot more Palestinian civilians while "not targeting" them and Palestinians ended up killing a large (%) of civilians but also some combatants while targeting civilians. I think the ratio on both sides is somewhere around 70% civilians (I'm sure who counts and how you count matters. Israel has always consistently reported details of all casualties including whether or not they are soldiers, their ranks, roles etc. Hamas reports all casualties as civilians.
> But you are not going to find an explicit call to go and murder civilians and the Israeli far right doesn't think that way.
This is exactly what happens in the West Bank every single day. Settlers and IDF soldiers will go shoot up schools, murder random passerby, etc., and then the Israeli state will give them more weapons and supplies to do it again the next day.
There are settlers in the west bank who go out of their way to intimidate and use violence against Palestinians. Outright random murdering of civilians is rare and unusual. (e.g. the Goldstein massacre in Hebron many years ago). What does happen is friction that leads to more violence that leads to deaths. An example might be settlers entering a Palestinian village, people throwing stones at them or a general brawl/violence, that leads to shooting and deaths. These are terrible stories, the settlers are looking for trouble, and yes often when the IDF or the police intervenes they will take the side of the settlers.
If you look at media reports you're going to find some relatively large number of Palestinian casualties in the west bank. But those reports generally conflate a lot of different things. "Settlers randomly murder Palestinians" is really not a thing in the big picture. The total number will include things like someone trying to stab a policeman and getting shot. Hamas or PIJ members shot during military confrontation. Collateral damage during those confrontations. Palestinians shot while e.g. throwing rocks or otherwise attacking Israeli soldiers or civilians. And yes some deaths that are a result of settler altercations of some sort (the vast minority) mostly in some specific hot spots.
Again I am totally opposed to settlements in the west bank and certainly to violence against innocent Palestinian civilians but there is a more complex story here than you'd think. It's true that some subset of settlers are lawless, armed, and more aggressively assert themselves "in the face" of the Palestinian population. It's not great. Hopefully the upcoming elections in Israel will change things a little bit. I would say that most Israelis agree with my position and many actively try to help the Palestinians but the government being so right wing and the general mood after the war makes things harder.
EDIT: your second link basically supports what I am saying. People are intimidated and threatened to leave. Not murdered. Re: the CNN article I have no idea or comments. I've no heard of this case. I will still maintain that the murder of civilians by settlers is extremely rare and the idea of murdering random Palestinians isn't really something that is mainstay Israeli right wing ideology.
EDIT2: Yeah Ben Gvir is a nut job and certain elements of the Israeli right admire Goldstein and e.g. Yigal Amir. That still doesn't mean they actually go and call or do these things. It's also a fringe that has always been there (e.g. Meir Kahana) but certainly has grown somewhat with the continuous violence.
> There is some law enforcement but very much not enough under the current government
There is exactly enough "law enforcement" to keep up appearances for the international community and the liberals in Tel Aviv who prefer to live in denial. There have been 0 (yes, zero) convictions of Israeli citizens for violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, for several years now. (EDIT: see correction in reply below)
> People are intimidated and threatened to leave. Not murdered.
Yes, threatened to leave on pain of being murdered. The Israeli right understands that Holocaust-style mass extermination is far more trouble than it's worth; you just need to kill enough people to scare away the rest.
Israelis in Tel Aviv know exactly what's going on. Even reporters from Israeli mainstream media have been beaten by settlers. Your first statement is really incorrect.
A minor (at the time) who killed a Palestinian woman (Aisha al-Rabi) by throwing a stone on her car was convicted on the offense of "terrorist manslaughter".
So far we have 0 correct statements out of 2.
The last one is more of a judgement. Israeli right has no interest and never has had interest in "Holocaust-style" extermination of anyone. That bit I'd file under blood libel. There's right and there's far right and this is not on the agenda of either (unlike what others want to do to Jews e.g. in Israel and other places). Most of the far right actually has no problem with Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the West Bank in general. Some elements do indeed want to have them all leave. I think most Israelis know that's not gonna happen. The wave of suicide attacks in the early 2000's and now the Oct 7th attacks have however convinced many Israelis that there is no future to something like a two state solution and generally that there will be no peace at least in this generation.
>do intentionally call for and attack Israeli civilians and the presence of a "military" target is not a factor.
Settlers occupying Palestinian land, especially that land immediately adjacent to Gaza really aren't civilians in the normal sense, more like an armed militia with their families along as human shields. Comparison point I usually see are armed homesteaders in most colonial scenarios.
Edit: Actually I should mention this also applies in the west bank, and golan heights. Not to leave Syrians moved on for Israels "Buffer Zone" finding out they have been settled out of the bargain. They also have a right to return.
I think the time where Palestinians could be reasonably expected to rehome themselves to their land peacefully has long since passed.
Israeli settlers are just as welcome as always to just get out of the way and permit the resettlement to happen peacably.
I think is why these topics tend to get flagged, because everyone takes the first opportunity to voice unrelated grievances. Maybe if we stick to the topic?
Hamas has definitely recruited children:
"Hamas won't say how many thousands of men it has, but some here estimate as many as half of Gaza's teenaged boys want in. Mohamad, 18, and his 16-year-old twin brothers Hussain and Awad are newly trained. All three say if war were to break out with Israel tomorrow, they'd be ready to fight, though they've only had a week of training."
Re: journalists:
"New York, June 25, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is conducting a full review of its database of journalists killed during the Israel-Gaza War after militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) published obituaries identifying as combatants individuals previously listed by CPJ as journalists."
There are a lot of children in Gaza and it's a tragedy how many died and suffer in Gaza. For sure. But there are still armed Hamas combatants who played a major part of the suffering of the civilian population of Gaza. If we want to protect the children of Gaza today we need to figure this out.
Again, fuck off. I don't hate Israel, I don't think it should be destroyed. I have also watched it wage a brutal, genocidal campaign against a helpless people who have spent decades trapped in what is essentially an open-air prison. I've watched Israeli settlers kick Palestinians off their land. I've watched Israeli snipers murder journalists and I've watched Israel - and useful fools like you - lie about it.
I believe the current government of Israel should be tried for war crimes - and the ICC concurs. You are the hateful one here - you are clearly unable to see Palestinians as people or understand the conditions they have been forced to live in.
This whole deflection game you play, it's not working any more bud. People know - people have seen what they're doing over there. So keep lying, to us, to yourself. It won't change how people are feeling. It won't stop the continual collapse of public opinion of Israel and its government.
LOL, it seems that a lot of your posts get flagged. The one where you startet with "You hate Israel" is where I wanted to answer, but it's gone.
And perhaps for good, because the person you claim to do that never said this.
It's fun who critiques on tactics or people is often just blown out of propertion by people like you. Suddenly, the critique is seen as general, targeting all of Israel (e.g. the full population) and not just the current government, or the IDF.
IMHO, it is you that hate Israel.
By asking for escalation, or discussing existing escalation away, the conflict will never be solved. You'd need a full genocide to solve the conflict. Perhaps biblical right-wings want that again (they claim to have been ordered a genocide to the Kanaanites after the exodus by YHWH themselves).
But if you look at terrorist conflics (North-Irelands IRA, Basques ETA, Kolumbia's Sendero Luminoso and all the others) ... then exactly zero times was the conflict by years after years of escalation.
What you do, like many escalaters, is that you look for horrible acts of Hamas. And you find them, plenty. But you don't look at horrible acts of IDF, or the Settlers. You would find them, too. But you are not just by ignoring one conflict party totally. And thus you are totally unable to reason correctly. And then ALL of your conclusions are void.
IMHO if we want "to protect the children of Gaza" when we need to go after ALL people responsible for e.g. bombing whole houses, the the huge fields of rubble that used to be civilian towns, too. From the lowest soldier to the highest general or defense minister. We need to go after those people that made a plan to starve them, by hindering trucks with edibles into Gaza. And we need to go after those the recruited and trained them --- and don't get me wrong: "go after" here doesn't mean "execute a death penalty without or without a court verdict". JUST going after one originators of the cruelties will do ... not create piece. it will just raise the next generation of terrorists.
I'm really sorry you have these strong feelings, however, the first two links don't even mention Israel, and the third quotes the closest thing Israel has to a Nazi party, of which I assure you there are plenty in many countries.
What he is looking for (I presume) is a center-right or centrist to land a thoughtful comment that get upvotes or at least not attract downvotes from anything left of center. (Without leaning on the crutch of credibility/accumulated karma)
Imho constraints make it almost impossible in this thread. Less almost impossible is for a center left to larp a centrist just long enough to land the same comment.
That's a impossibly tall order given my writing skills, but I think you (or eg tptacek/gwern using sockpuppet) could do it ;)
It's not surprising to see any number of players running these kinds of campaigns. LLMs are already influencing people at scale.
SEO was a powerful technique 20 years ago, but today the power lies in optimizing content for the ability to influence LLM training. LLM influence is a battle ground that marketing companies and political movements are contending for.
It’s not “the Jews” it’s Israel, and I suspect the greater attention is due to the greater crimes being perpetrated by the Israeli government compared to those other states.
I think the difference is probably related to the ends being pursued by each of those states at the moment. Only one is engaged in what the UN, HRW, and most legal experts call a genocide. So influence operations in support of an ongoing genocide are just more noteworthy than your run-of-the-mill authoritarianism/corruption.
The difference is that they are not doing these things. This is just hasbara against other enemies that Israel is targeting. They believe that the entire Middle East was promised to them by God, and they call other people jihadis.
I think it may get a bit more attention in the US due to Section 219 of NDAA 2027, which does add more layers to the situation than say, Turkiye. The implications are on a different level. And with all four frontier models having contracts with the Pentagon, it has me thinking too.
They do tend to get downvoted. But I have seen them on HN lot. Blaming the Jews for everything. Telling people how evil Jews are etc. Presumably you can still search downvoted comments (unless maybe mods nuke them, I've no idea) - search for "jew"/"jews" (or some of the antisemitic synonyms).
The article talks about how the articles are AI written and written at a super prodigious pace. In an alliterative way, I agree at 50K feet we could say it is the same as putting out opinion pieces. I don’t see any reason it is only noteworthy because presumably some Jewish people are involved.
The slave trade was a bloodbath. The Sassoon family opium trade and opium war was a bloodbath. Mao was a bloodbath. Stalin was a bloodbath. WWI and II were bloodbaths. The middle east was and is a bloodbath. Ukraine is a bloodbath.
Im curious why is when there is a war and both sides use all the tools they can in an informational war - only one side is to blame and to use the fact of using the tool as a proof of that side being the bad guys? This doesn’t make logical sense.
At some point they may be indistinguishable from human-produced work, so the only way to verify if a site is someone's genuine opinion or AI-generated narrative is through some form of authority (or something else that is very difficult for AI to fake, but that protection can be broken by advancing technology).
If that happens, then in turn AI chatbot makers would in turn need to look for these kinds of authority to continue to provide accurate information, and said authority websites can use their privileged position to charge for access of their data.
And it's not just state actors. Anyone who was online during the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trials was likely inundated with media about that trial. Both of their legal teams utilized bots to drive online discussions[1][2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice
[1] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-07-19/...
[2] https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/02/26/depp-v-heard-who-tr...
Anyways, I got really interested in this topic around mid 2010s because of some really interesting reporting by Codastory[0] covering Russian "troll factories" especially used to influence opinion in eastern Ukraine, but also in many other circumstances. In Houston in 2016, Russian troll accounts planned both an ANTI Muslim rally AND a counterprotest to that rally all on Facebook.[1] Hundreds of real human beings showed up!
Russia got a ton of attention for their use of troll farms but the truth is that the US and certain allies have actually been using stuff like this for far longer and, imo, with much more success. In fact, Coda Story itself is funded by the NED which is a massive pillar of global US, uh, "soft power".
[0] https://www.codastory.com/
[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/11/01/561427876/how-russia-used-fac...
I'm not a fan of World, but this is a portent of things to come. Spread the disease, sell the cure as they say.
Thankfully the resources at our local libraries are a) selected by a combination of librarian curation and public demand, b) often published before 2022, c) heavy things printed on paper or stored in a database and unlikely to suddenly change their content or disappear overnight when a new news cycle breaks. Written works aren’t necessarily credible even if they aren’t slop, but thanks to curators who care, our libraries are significantly less susceptible (although definitely not immune [2]) to ai slop, and propaganda and manipulation efforts than a search engine. The internet continues to enshittify, and truth becomes further eroded by this coming wave of ai enabled propaganda, we are going to have to turn somewhere if we want to find trustworthy resources. Personally, if it gets to the point that verifying sources from public search results becomes too hard with all the new misinformation and slop, I’ll start propritizing human curation over SEO and start visiting my local library’s website a lot more.
[1] https://thenewthings.com/p/apple-big-ai-book-slop-problem
[2] https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-slop-is-already-in-your...
Books where the author has successfully hoodwinked the publishing process into believing that AI generated text is their own, those will turn up, just as plagiarised books will.
I think using LLMs to research is completely fine, as long as authors would take the information and synthesize their own opinions based on the findings. I read books/articles/posts/comments to hear other PEOPLE's opinions, not LLM generated opinions.
Probably a handful of books in such libraries already have some text in them where the author has tried to pass off fragments of LLM-generated prose as their own and have got that past editors, reviewers and publishers, and that will sadly get worse.
One consequence is that one should be extra-wary when asking AI about current, controversial topics.
But another consequence is maybe that there will be a demand for models with an older cutoff, before generalized poisoning and slop?
The word you're looking for is "reputation". It's been a critical part of society since forever.
Netanyahu said that "Qatar is not an enemy country". Is he wrong about that? https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-08-14/ty-article/.p...
Qatar is spreading fake information and is funding Hamas as well as anti-Israel classes in major US colleges.
If you don’t trust Netanyahu then you should disregard the link you shared as well and that just strengthens my point.
This is absolutely true but people don't want to hear about this. Qatar is the main propagator of many student bodies in the US. This is how you get students saying "gloabalize intifada", "death to the USA”, occupying buildings, etc.
Qatar has a long, well funded strategy for influence in the west which is pretty much their only leverage.
In addition they are the main funders of Hamas, alongside hosting the Hamas leaders in fancy hotels in Doha for many, many years.
But it’s also October 7 that made the average joe even more extreme in their opinions.
I doubt there are any true friends in the middle east, just temporary allies of convinence.
Just check the facts about each and every government in the middle east.
Obama used social networks to spread a milquetoast 'yes we can' message, not to justify an ongoing genocide. How is that even a comparison. Israel is closer to Triumph des Willens than it is to promoting the Affordable Care Act, you do realize that right?
It's not 'far from being a perfect state', it's waging old testament wars of extermination on its neighbors and towns
So it is hilarious that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like that is out in the open.
I don't support Ben Gvir in the slightest but you're using something he said to twist the narrative, which ironically is exactly what the Hanover think-tank was supposedly meant to remedy.
Hamas is the worst of the worst in humanity.
> “It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister,” he said. “I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat — there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people.”
The man used to have a shrine to a mass murderer in his home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir
> Ben-Gvir is known for being a provocateur and has attracted headlines for a variety of reasons: threatening Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on live television in 1995 shortly before his assassination; having had a portrait in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish terrorist and mass murderer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacr...)...
Politicians say really terrible, stupid things on a fairly regular basis. The difference between the two situations is that Ben-Gvir is loathed by 90% of Israeli society (Trump still has 33% approval) and unlike Trump has no power to follow through on his threats.[1]
[1]https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-06/israel-court-battle-o...
Tl;dr Lawfare is a thing and it’s effing everywhere.
Maybe that 90% number is for Tel Aviv. In national polls, they both have roughly the same approval rating.
I have no doubt that Ben-Gvir has a similar segment of haters in Israel. They want the same things, but they don't want to do it in the style of a leering hooligan fishing for a fistfight.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly.
On television.
So it is both hilarious and disturbing that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like the aforementioned is out in the open for everyone to witness.
presumably that you don't have employees that do any of the proverbial thinking, which is the case here.
Every think tank has its biases and funding sources but something like RAND is an actual entity at which people do research, this "Hanover Public Policy Institute" has nothing to do with Hanover, policy and isn't an institute, but a deliberately misleadingly presenting arm of the Israeli government proxied through a German advertising company
I don't understand the modern effort to engage in 'information warfare' as a thing in and of itself. Each time it collapses and people sees what was 'really' happening, it just makes them that much less likely to believe you next time. And you also create a significant number of perpetually jaded people who will basically never believe you again, even when you're telling the truth. Countless politicians have proudly paraded around their pristine, seemingly untouched, copies of Meditations, but perhaps they should go for more foundational works, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Look at the US situation. It’s clear that Trump is a rapist - the truth has come out. It’s clear he’s corrupt. For all the “release the full Epstein files” discussion, it really wouldn’t change anything.
The truth will come out but will the people who can make it matter be listening?
If you look at the mathematical achievements of frontier models recently, their strength has been to bring in information from a vast array of sources and to consider them within the context of each other.
I anticipate that it won't be long before this ability to look into every nook and cranny with be able to identify academic fraud. Identifying every piece of academic fraud to date would probably come soon after.
It wouldn't take much to extend that ability to identify deliberate misinformation. That's in the future, but it looms close enough on the horizon that you would have to be a fool to create an evidence record like this in and attempt to trick the models of today.
I’ve yet to see a single one identify that on its own, rather than only reluctantly when confronted when documented facts it was objectively wrong.
So no, I doubt LLMs will do anything but promoted propaganda.
This is what a think tank is for.
A better headline would be "Israel fails to adequately paperwork their low-rent think tank".
Itamar Ben-Gvir, just recently, stated that he wants to kill 30-40 Palestinians every night. He said so, publicly.
He said that on TV. On TV.
So it is hilarious that Israel is trying to influence chatbots when shit like that is out in the open.
I don't want to provide links because it's all over the place at this point but if anyone presses me then I'll do so.
If individual Israelis want to claim they're not monsters, what Palestinians do or doesn't do doesn't enter into it, only the actions and deeds ( or lack thereof) of the Israelis in question do, and how that meets or fails to meet specific standards of morality. The same goes for Palestinians.
> I think sometimes people forget that the war was started intentionally with full knowledge what would happen.
So, collective punishment. Don't bother about the "violent rhetoric" of any "sides", deal with what you just said and what that says about you.
I never thought I'd see this kind of blatant anti-semitism on HN.
Jews in Europe were persecuted for hundreds of years as foreign invaders told to go back to their homeland. Immediately after the Holocaust, we realized it was time to return to our own country; we could not rely on the kindness of European nations.
And now that we have returned, we're labelled invaders of our own nation, our historic homeland of 3,500 years. But Jews have been in Jerusalem longer than the British have been in London. We built Tel Aviv from a desert into a modern city. We rebuilt Jerusalem and opened it up to Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
It's wild historic revisionism to claim Jews are stealing Arab lands. There are over 30 Muslim- and Arab-majority nations. There is only a single Jewish nation: our historic, 3,500 year old homeland: Israel.
Might as well say "humans always lived here, I'm a human, so it's my land now". If this is the level of thought these crimes are defended with, oh boy.
Because Israel begged them to! https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2023/10/27/netanyahus-sup...
"Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas" —Benjamin Netanyahu
Look at how evil this group is -> genocide of their entire state is good! (Don't look at the fact that I demanded that this group is explicitly funded - that is not important)
Still waiting.
That message a reply to YOU, but that didn't stop you from posting the same false info multiple times in this thread.
All four frontier models have active contracts with the Pentagon.
And some might say, that alone means little.
But when you take into consideration the implications of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act, whether one endorses it or not, the effects of that mentioned in TFA become quite formidable, and plausibly official.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-Israel_FUTURES_A...
Edit: I see this comment got immediately flagged. Is there any point of debate here? Instead of disappearing the comment/data, maybe enlighten me, or assuage my concerns. Section 219 was objectively unprecedented in what it seeks to accomplish. Can it not be taken for granted that it would aid such efforts as the article cites? If not, explain.
I wonder if the same thing would happen if someone posted something on Yitzhak Rabin. I suppose that could be a test to prove whether some topics truly just cannot be discussed.
Where? I don't see it in your comment here.
Is it in the room with us right now?
I've thought about this many times over the years. I think we've now reached the point where that's going to happen. And state actors seem like the obvious first offenders.
Google is relatively good at filtering out astroturfed pages from the top of search results but they've also have years when a Turkish government page denying the Armenian genocide was the top result for that event so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Google relies a lot on authority of a domain and that's been relatively effective.
It seems like this authority concept is missing from LLM training and a random comment on Reddit is treated with as much authority as an article by the New York Times. So it's now orders of magnitude easier to poison LLMs with Reddit comments and submissions. And for anyone who doesn't know, brigading Reddit is remarkably easy. It takes as little as a few hundred accounts to get something onto r/all if you're clever. Israeli hasbara operations are absolutely capable of this. And they engage in it.
I'm also reminded in a weird way of pre-atomic steel. For anyone who doesn't know, this is steel made before 1945 that is incredibly low in radiation because we hadn't detonated any nuclear bombs yet. It's valuable for making MRIs and the like that are super sensitive. We actually go and recover WW2 shipwrecks just for the steel. It is a finite resource.
Well, that's what pre-2022 written content is now. It's slop-free content to train AI models on because training them on AI slop is of much more limited value. This goes for everything from books to Youtube videos to Reddit posts. Just like pre-atomic steel, we now have pre-slop human content.
I honestly don't know where we go from here.
Because what I think and read is any flamewar topic gets removed - and this surely qualifies.
Do you have evidence?
Edit: Would this qualify also as fake news: https://www.wsj.com/politics/israels-50-million-experiment-t...
If so, please explain
Edit: I think I grabbed the wrong link. I intended to find the equivalent of this: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-funded-465m-camp...
Edit 2: Correction: both apply.
that site itself is a product of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft which began life with funding from both Koch and Soros Foundations [0] along with donations from other fairly large and common American foundations like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. so for one, you have money coming from someone who survived the Holocaust that's funding a supposedly anti-Semitic site. and for two, you don't get across-the-board grants from extremely well-funded and tightly controlled givers like these without both connections within the American political establishment and the ability to stand up to donor audits, both things that a weak-on-soft-power nation state would be incapable of pulling off
so I don't think you're going to convince them with actual evidence. when you've been propagandized to your entire life and stake your entire identity around some popular belief even the mildest criticism will feel like a deep attack. it's the same for any other dogmatist, whether it's a Patriot's fan or a religious zealot
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quincy_Institute_for_Responsib...
to me, the grandparent poster claimed X is more likely than Y without ever claiming equivalence. therefore I have no idea what you're arguing.
is that how ben-gvir defines terrorist? as part of them being fanatic morons i wouldnt trust they share that definition. iirc theyve also talked about wanting to kill children because theyll grow up to be terrorists?
When I searched for that quote on Kagi I found https://www.jdn.co.il/news/2210880/ (https://archive.is/IFhqo)
As translated by Firefox 153.0.1 on Fedora 44:
> Ben-Gvir wondered: “What about being more offensive? Why not take all the gunmen off at funerals? Take a few times off at the air at funerals. Why don’t you put a helicopter in the air and kill 40-30 terrorists?” Transport Minister Miri Regev joined Ben-Gvir and said: "This is a great idea."
> The Chief of Staff replied: “We are doing a lot of offensive operations. Collecting weapons. I have a little more military experience than you. When the IDF goes to the heart of a refugee camp every night, it's an attack, not a defense. There aren't many armies that can lift such operations. The IDF is acting offensively and distinctly. In a crowded environment you need to know who you kill and who you don't. We've often entered funerals, weddings and birthdays, we do it professionally. When we kill those we should kill and not kill innocent people.”
> However, it seems that the Chief of Staff’s response did not satisfy Ben-Gvir, who answered: “This attack is to kill terrorists in masses. You have great opportunities at funerals that they come and not take advantage of.”
Kagi and Google give similar translations. The provided quote seems to be the first paragraph in this translation. More context in the article.
I think "helicopters to attack funerals" is really not the correct interpretation of the original statement. Funerals for Hamas members often include massive amounts of armed combatants. The (dumb maybe) point is to go after those combatants. And yes, there is a potential risk for other people to get hurt which is why Israel does not tend to do this... and Ben Gvir would like Israel to still do it. But the target and the scenario are important and the new cycle turns this into "kill random people for the fun of it".
So to bring this back to influencing "AI" chatbots presumably the inaccurate/biased reporting is going to dominate over this "Hanover Institute" articles plus ofcourse responsiblestatecraft.org a left leaning organization is doing their own influencing. There are many who are doing their own form of influencing on people and AI chatbots.
It is obvious that if he was misquoted he would have definitely corrected his statement. But he wants the army to hear his words in a confusing manner. And you are on his side when you are defending him and trying to sow doubt in how his words sound.
I'm pretty sure that for both Ben Gvir and Smotrich having dozens of civilians killed when the target is a combatant is justified but intentionally attacking dozens of civilians when there is no combatant is not. They also do not represent the official government position though presumably their voters (something like 5% maybe of the public) would also hold similar opinions. They are also religious so they view a lot of this and their morality through a religious lens which I don't fully understand.
Not to compare but Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups have and do intentionally call for and attack Israeli civilians and the presence of a "military" target is not a factor. They prefer to go after civilians. They are also not that "extreme" in the public opinion. Their religious lens is also quite different.
Also yes, Israel has ended up killing a lot more Palestinian civilians while "not targeting" them and Palestinians ended up killing a large (%) of civilians but also some combatants while targeting civilians. I think the ratio on both sides is somewhere around 70% civilians (I'm sure who counts and how you count matters. Israel has always consistently reported details of all casualties including whether or not they are soldiers, their ranks, roles etc. Hamas reports all casualties as civilians.
This is exactly what happens in the West Bank every single day. Settlers and IDF soldiers will go shoot up schools, murder random passerby, etc., and then the Israeli state will give them more weapons and supplies to do it again the next day.
(Yes, shoot up schools: https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/22/middleeast/west-bank-settler-.... Overview of how the system works: https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-organized-settler-mili...)
As for Ben-Gvir specifically, he described mass shooter Baruch Goldstein as a "martyr" and his "hero", and for many years hung a portrait of the man on his wall. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-ben-gvir-baruch-go...
There is some law enforcement but very much not enough under the current government: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/west-bank-israeli-settler-char...
But this is not what we're talking about here.
If you look at media reports you're going to find some relatively large number of Palestinian casualties in the west bank. But those reports generally conflate a lot of different things. "Settlers randomly murder Palestinians" is really not a thing in the big picture. The total number will include things like someone trying to stab a policeman and getting shot. Hamas or PIJ members shot during military confrontation. Collateral damage during those confrontations. Palestinians shot while e.g. throwing rocks or otherwise attacking Israeli soldiers or civilians. And yes some deaths that are a result of settler altercations of some sort (the vast minority) mostly in some specific hot spots.
Again I am totally opposed to settlements in the west bank and certainly to violence against innocent Palestinian civilians but there is a more complex story here than you'd think. It's true that some subset of settlers are lawless, armed, and more aggressively assert themselves "in the face" of the Palestinian population. It's not great. Hopefully the upcoming elections in Israel will change things a little bit. I would say that most Israelis agree with my position and many actively try to help the Palestinians but the government being so right wing and the general mood after the war makes things harder.
EDIT: your second link basically supports what I am saying. People are intimidated and threatened to leave. Not murdered. Re: the CNN article I have no idea or comments. I've no heard of this case. I will still maintain that the murder of civilians by settlers is extremely rare and the idea of murdering random Palestinians isn't really something that is mainstay Israeli right wing ideology.
EDIT2: Yeah Ben Gvir is a nut job and certain elements of the Israeli right admire Goldstein and e.g. Yigal Amir. That still doesn't mean they actually go and call or do these things. It's also a fringe that has always been there (e.g. Meir Kahana) but certainly has grown somewhat with the continuous violence.
There is exactly enough "law enforcement" to keep up appearances for the international community and the liberals in Tel Aviv who prefer to live in denial. There have been 0 (yes, zero) convictions of Israeli citizens for violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, for several years now. (EDIT: see correction in reply below)
> People are intimidated and threatened to leave. Not murdered.
Yes, threatened to leave on pain of being murdered. The Israeli right understands that Holocaust-style mass extermination is far more trouble than it's worth; you just need to kill enough people to scare away the rest.
The zero conviction statement is also incorrect. Here's a conviction from this year: https://www.kan.org.il/content/kan-news/defense/1013279/
A minor (at the time) who killed a Palestinian woman (Aisha al-Rabi) by throwing a stone on her car was convicted on the offense of "terrorist manslaughter".
So far we have 0 correct statements out of 2.
The last one is more of a judgement. Israeli right has no interest and never has had interest in "Holocaust-style" extermination of anyone. That bit I'd file under blood libel. There's right and there's far right and this is not on the agenda of either (unlike what others want to do to Jews e.g. in Israel and other places). Most of the far right actually has no problem with Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the West Bank in general. Some elements do indeed want to have them all leave. I think most Israelis know that's not gonna happen. The wave of suicide attacks in the early 2000's and now the Oct 7th attacks have however convinced many Israelis that there is no future to something like a two state solution and generally that there will be no peace at least in this generation.
So I call 0 out of 3.
Settlers occupying Palestinian land, especially that land immediately adjacent to Gaza really aren't civilians in the normal sense, more like an armed militia with their families along as human shields. Comparison point I usually see are armed homesteaders in most colonial scenarios.
Edit: Actually I should mention this also applies in the west bank, and golan heights. Not to leave Syrians moved on for Israels "Buffer Zone" finding out they have been settled out of the bargain. They also have a right to return.
I think the time where Palestinians could be reasonably expected to rehome themselves to their land peacefully has long since passed.
Israeli settlers are just as welcome as always to just get out of the way and permit the resettlement to happen peacably.
And how many after you stop counting journalists and little kids? We've all seen what Israel is doing, no matter how they try to hide it.
Hamas has definitely recruited children: "Hamas won't say how many thousands of men it has, but some here estimate as many as half of Gaza's teenaged boys want in. Mohamad, 18, and his 16-year-old twin brothers Hussain and Awad are newly trained. All three say if war were to break out with Israel tomorrow, they'd be ready to fight, though they've only had a week of training."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hamas-grows-with-young-recruits...
Re: journalists: "New York, June 25, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is conducting a full review of its database of journalists killed during the Israel-Gaza War after militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) published obituaries identifying as combatants individuals previously listed by CPJ as journalists."
https://cpj.org/2026/06/cpj-undertakes-review-of-its-documen...
There are a lot of children in Gaza and it's a tragedy how many died and suffer in Gaza. For sure. But there are still armed Hamas combatants who played a major part of the suffering of the civilian population of Gaza. If we want to protect the children of Gaza today we need to figure this out.
Here's a list of journalists killed so far in this conflict for anyone actually interested in what's going on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...
> If we want to protect the children of Gaza today we need to figure this out.
Fuck off. If you want to protect the children of Gaza, demand that Israel stop bombing and sniping them.
I believe the current government of Israel should be tried for war crimes - and the ICC concurs. You are the hateful one here - you are clearly unable to see Palestinians as people or understand the conditions they have been forced to live in.
This whole deflection game you play, it's not working any more bud. People know - people have seen what they're doing over there. So keep lying, to us, to yourself. It won't change how people are feeling. It won't stop the continual collapse of public opinion of Israel and its government.
And perhaps for good, because the person you claim to do that never said this.
It's fun who critiques on tactics or people is often just blown out of propertion by people like you. Suddenly, the critique is seen as general, targeting all of Israel (e.g. the full population) and not just the current government, or the IDF.
IMHO, it is you that hate Israel.
By asking for escalation, or discussing existing escalation away, the conflict will never be solved. You'd need a full genocide to solve the conflict. Perhaps biblical right-wings want that again (they claim to have been ordered a genocide to the Kanaanites after the exodus by YHWH themselves).
But if you look at terrorist conflics (North-Irelands IRA, Basques ETA, Kolumbia's Sendero Luminoso and all the others) ... then exactly zero times was the conflict by years after years of escalation.
What you do, like many escalaters, is that you look for horrible acts of Hamas. And you find them, plenty. But you don't look at horrible acts of IDF, or the Settlers. You would find them, too. But you are not just by ignoring one conflict party totally. And thus you are totally unable to reason correctly. And then ALL of your conclusions are void.
IMHO if we want "to protect the children of Gaza" when we need to go after ALL people responsible for e.g. bombing whole houses, the the huge fields of rubble that used to be civilian towns, too. From the lowest soldier to the highest general or defense minister. We need to go after those people that made a plan to starve them, by hindering trucks with edibles into Gaza. And we need to go after those the recruited and trained them --- and don't get me wrong: "go after" here doesn't mean "execute a death penalty without or without a court verdict". JUST going after one originators of the cruelties will do ... not create piece. it will just raise the next generation of terrorists.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hamas-has-added-up...
> But official U.S. figures show that prior to Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas had anywhere between 20,000 and 25,000 fighters.
All this death and destruction to leave Hamas with... roughly the same numbers? Ooof. Embarassing.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/05/gaza-palestin...
Hopefully Palestinians can figure out how to take control back. The PA isn't great but it's a lot better.
Yes, that’s the obvious result the rest of the world has pointed out for decades, and why this style of war is self-defeating.
Orphans make good recruits.
Seems super on point to me.
It should be noted that this piece hasn't been downweighted off the frontpage
I suspect that dang is trying to extract some previously unobtainable upside from the contrarian dynamic . Mad respect.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
What he is looking for (I presume) is a center-right or centrist to land a thoughtful comment that get upvotes or at least not attract downvotes from anything left of center. (Without leaning on the crutch of credibility/accumulated karma)
Imho constraints make it almost impossible in this thread. Less almost impossible is for a center left to larp a centrist just long enough to land the same comment.
That's a impossibly tall order given my writing skills, but I think you (or eg tptacek/gwern using sockpuppet) could do it ;)
SEO was a powerful technique 20 years ago, but today the power lies in optimizing content for the ability to influence LLM training. LLM influence is a battle ground that marketing companies and political movements are contending for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-Israel_FUTURES_A...
I have seen none, perhaps in comments downvoted to illegability
Can you name some, please?
[1]https://quincyinst.org/research/the-eighth-front-inside-isra...
Not all Jewish citizens of Israel support the actions of their government and certainly not all Jewish people globally do so either.
Why is this one in particular different? — besides “muh Jews!”
The article answers this: For one, the 'papers' are entirely AI-generated.