Israel Paying US Social Media Influencers $7,000 Per Post As Right-Wing Support Craters
Following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting in New York on Friday with a group of pro-Israel influencers, we learn that Israel is likely paying them a whopping $7,000 per pro-Israel social-media post in a desperate drive to bolster plummeting support of Israel among America’s young conservatives.
That’s the conclusion of Responsible Statecraft’s Nick Cleveland-Stout, based on analysis of a disclosure filed with the US Department of Justice as required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). While pro-Israel lobbying heavyweight AIPAC is notoriously exempt from FARA registration, the social media operation comes under the transparency law’s provisions because Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is paying for it.
According to the FARA disclosures, Israel refers to the paid-influencer campaign as the “Esther Project.” That name closely resembles “Project Esther,” the Heritage Foundation proposal for the US government and pro-Israel groups to destroy the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States by declaring activists to be members of a “terrorist support network.” and using that as the pretext for deportations, lawsuits, job terminations, school expulsions and exclusion from “open society.”
Hans Mahncke@HansMahncke
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3h
Few people know how rampant these online paid-for speech campaigns are. There are entire syndicates pushing this or that narrative, and you’d probably be shocked to learn who’s actually writing the tweets for some of your favorite accounts, because it’s not who you think. It’s a huge problem, and we’d be idiots not to remember how the last “Covid moment” actually unfolded. The whole thing was kicked off with coordinated speech ops: fake collapse videos out of Wuhan, staged panic footage, the mask-and-distancing theater, endless phony statistics, fake hospital footage on a loop—basically full contagion cosplay. That manufactured hysteria greased the skids for lockdowns, mail-in “voting,” massive job losses, medical coercion with a so-called vaccine, mass censorship, blacklists, and the silencing of anyone who told the truth.
If we don’t call it out now, they’ll run the same playbook again, only bigger.
Hey…over here ….
No one offered me $7000 !
what am I chopped liver ?
sheesh
🙂
Ahem — that was $7,000 PER article as I recall……….
they deduct for errant spelling
YA BUT SHOULD BE MORE FOR ALL CAPS !!!
Hans Mahncke@HansMahncke
The massive, ever-expanding world of organized paid-for speech is a real problem, not only because it warps the perception of public opinion, but because it inevitably invites calls to regulate speech.
Marjorie is right that there are already laws on the books, like FEC, FCC, FTC, FARA, etc, that cover paid influence. But none of that is being enforced on social media, and even if it were, how exactly would you police it? And more to the point, how do you do it without crushing free speech in the process?
Any registration or disclosure regime would obliterate anonymity, which is a cornerstone of free speech. So yes, this is a hard problem that has to be thought through carefully, especially because these paid influence campaigns—as we saw during Covid—can generate mass hysteria and clear the path for authoritarian abuses.
But before anyone starts drafting grand solutions, it would help if people like Marjorie would stop amplifying the paid narrative accounts they claim to oppose.
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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene??@RepMTG
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7h
Paid Social Media Influencers should have a signifying badge or different color check mark informing the public that their account is paid for their posts.
Just like broadcasters have to say, “this message brought to you by …”, social media influencer accounts should have to
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“Any registration or disclosure regime would obliterate anonymity”
No it wouldn’t.
Like MTG says, if you are a COMMERCIAL, self tag it as such.
If you don’t, and then are caught out, you get a Red X.