Tech giants cash in on soaring conspiracy theory craze
Tech giants cash in on soaring conspiracy theory craze
As the war in Gaza continues, conspiracy theories are gaining wide circulation on the web, and the various parties are creating a digital space of mutual destruction. Companies like Google and X profit from the increased activity, benefitting from advertising revenue and extracting massive data from users
The war in Gaza continues, and thus the effort of the various parties to establish narratives in the digital arena is increasing. Everyone plays a different role in the cat and mouse game of spreading conspiracy theories, reporting posts or mass comments, but in the end there is only one winner - the technology companies.
The tools are many and varied and include blogs, crowdsourcing for reporting and creating systems based on generative artificial intelligence to create response mechanisms. The various parties pay money to promote the messages on the social networks and produce huge data for the technology giants. The massive and organized usage creates a digital space of guaranteed mutual destruction.
Dynamics of mutual destruction
A user on the X social network called StopZionistHate already has 125,000 followers. This is an especially impressive number when you consider that this profile was only created in November 2023. The user Defund Israel Now can celebrate a slightly less impressive achievement with 36,000 followers, also created only last November. Both have a similar graphic design for their logo in which the Star of David is decorated in the colors of the American flag - red, white, and blue.
The two users have another similarity - both pay for X's golden checkmark, an upgraded and extremely expensive status of "official verified organizations" that costs the user $1,000 a month. Since it was launched on X in April 2023, the network has been giving it free to the 10,000 organizations with the most followers, and in January they even launched a sale on X that included an 80% discount.
The checkmark can also be shared through a mechanism known as: Affiliates. StopZionistHate has two of these - one called Tru Wire with 3,412 followers, and another called Raven Mission with 1,897 followers. Although the latter has the smallest number of followers, it seems to be the backbone of the activity in question, and the only one that points to a website with content, even if it is one organized and arranged in a relatively amateurish way.
StopZionistHate links on its page to a website that only contains links to various users on other networks including TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, where the same content is recycled; Defund Israel Now has a web page with a mission statement: "End Zionism - Free America", and a few lines on the way to accomplish this: boycott products and eliminate investments in Israeli companies or with ties to Israel; Or in short - BDS. Linking to a website is a prerequisite to receive a gold checkmark from X.
These users are a mirror image - in name and in the manner of the activity - to the users that were created years before the current war in Gaza by those who support Israel. For example, StopZionistHate is the mirror image of StopAntisemitism, a user in X with about a quarter of a million followers and a blue checkmark (at a cost of about $10 a month) that was created in 2018, in which mainly doxing activity (revenge action of shaming and exposure) takes place.
Raven Mission is the mirror image of Canary Mission, which was launched in 2014 and includes files on people, well-known and less well-known, who expressed what they identified as "hate speech" against Israel, the United States or Jews. Raven Mission does a similar thing only to those who have expressed themselves in such a way against Palestinians or Arabs in general. All these organizations and users refer to each other continuously and engage their community members in the other communities: report, remove, comment or add community comments - whatever is possible.
Tools recently launched by pro-Israeli developers further increase user traffic. Defund Israel Now, for example, acted last month against a project called Words of Iron that was created in October and allows reporting and commenting on apparently pro-Palestinian posts or promoting pro-Israeli posts, sometimes quite old posts. In the pro-Palestinian group, they mobilized the community to use the Words of Iron tool for its opposite purpose, and reported pro-Israeli posts and promoted pro-Palestinian posts. The tool is currently not usable at all. The success was solemnly announced on TikTok and immediately moved on to the next project called Moovers, created by the Digital Leaders agency from Tel Aviv. Moovers also hardly managed to generate automatic responses or posts following the organized activity.
Despite Israel's clear advantages as a "start-up nation", the Israeli entrepreneurs did not invent these tools, whose purpose is "civic propaganda". Back in 2019, it was found that a Palestinian group called "Ihbid194" activated several thousand volunteers to respond and report on posts on social networks, with pre-prepared scripts. These methods, known as "coordinated inauthentic actions", are prohibited (at least in Meta), and ultimately result in public opinion standing firm in its original position.
This pointless dynamic produces two unrelated winners. First are white supremacists, who are apparently behind newcomers like StopZionistHate who hate Jews as much as they hate Arabs, and whose whole purpose is to establish a white and Christian America (which is not helping Israel or Palestinian war refugees).
Second are the technology companies and the owners of the social networks, ad sellers and data scrapers, who have enjoyed increased activity in recent months against the background of the war. Since traffic is data, social networks sell the data to advertisers to post ads, or use it to train artificial intelligence models. For example, X owner Elon Musk trains the model of the company he founded, xAI, on X data.
