Trump’s ex-campaign manager is running an Israeli propaganda operation

US President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale is overseeing an Israeli influence operation. Drop Site News reported that the operation is training bots to embellish fake claims that Palestinian journalists are linked to terrorism. The story has sparked debate about israel’s approach to using new technologies in information warfare.

The campaign has even tried to muddy the waters around the Israeli military’s murder of Palestinian child Hind Rajab. The operation aims to shape the views not of humans, but of the AI chatbots that people increasingly turn to for ‘corroborating’ information.

Drop Site reported on 28 July:

The key intended audience of these sites is not concerned Americans, it’s not even humans—most of the sites average a few hundred unique visitors each month.

Instead, Parscale and his firm, Clock Tower X, created them as part of a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to try and influence artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, tools like Claude or ChatGPT.

The process is known as Large Language Model (LLM) Poisoning. Drop Site reported:

In his initial agreement with Israel, Parscale said that he would deploy “websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations” as part of the contract.

Adding:

More recently, his team even told Axios they are “seeing success” at getting popular AI systems to incorporate information from their sites, though they declined to provide data.

Even more chillingly, the outlet said, the multi-million dollar scam “is working”.

Disinformation experts reviewed:

a Drop Site analysis of chatbot queries and training data.

They found:

tens of millions of Americans who use chatbots are increasingly likely to receive answers manipulated by Parscale on behalf of the Israeli government.

Drop Site asked Parscale-run search engines about things like whether US backing of Israel benefited America. The answer was invariably yes.

The outlet said:

All of Parscale’s websites contain a statement at the bottom which states “this material is distributed by Clock Tower X LLC on behalf of the State of Israel.” This statement is a mandatory disclosure requirement under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

The US-based website added:

Despite this, when Drop Site asked prominent chatbots about the latest news from Paxpoint.org, Perplexity and Copilot did not flag that the site was created as part of an Israeli influence operation. Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini did flag the caveat.

Disinformation expert Alice Lee told Drop Site the Israeli networks compared to Russian disinformation in interesting ways:

While Russia’s Pravda network overall is far larger, Parscale’s sites have a far higher rate of successfully being archived.

As the Canary reported on January:

half of all political accounts linked to Israel social media are bots. This includes many of the accounts boosting posts by Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his terrorist government.

Parscale is also linked to a firm which will be familiar to UK readers. Drop Site said:

Parscale, who gained national attention as Trump’s campaign manager for hiring the controversial microtargetting firm Cambridge Analytica, is the largest recipient of Israel’s massive influence investment.

Cambridge Analytica was the US and UK dark money-backed influence operation which shaped narratives around, for example, the 2016 Brexit referendum.

There was a time when Trump and his allies endlessly talked about ‘fake news’. To some degree they still do. But the truth is they are some of the most venomous purveyors of garbage information around, as well as major beneficiaries of the fact-free ‘mirror world’ they’ve created.

Featured image via the Canary

By Joe Glenton