— The apps raise questions for tech platforms over ‘citizen-led propaganda’ campaigns, experts say
Taylor Lorenz / Washington Post:
As the war in Gaza rages on, and both sides battle for support and public attention, supporters of Israel are making use of tools that allow them to mass report pro-Palestinian content as violating a platform’s rules.
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.”
— Techmeme