Green Party Leader Zack Polanski discusses the recent Manchester attack at a synagogue and the Labour party’s consequent attacks on the right to protest against Israel’s genocide. The UK Labour government actively supports and is complicit in Israel’s genocide.
Polanski also made a speech at the Green Party of England and Wales conference yesterday, many of the videos are very long.
https://www.facebook.com/JeremyCorbynMP/posts/1366999734791557
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As global public opinion shifts decisively against Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, the occupation state is intensifying efforts to dominate the information space through a network of paid influencers, algorithm manipulation, AI content framing and covert media partnerships. Recent revelations from filings under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act expose a sprawling Israeli propaganda campaign designed to distort public discourse, especially among younger audiences, and deflect mounting accusations of genocide.
At the centre of this campaign is a covert influence operation, exposed in documents filed under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through its contractor Bridges Partners, has reportedly paid up to $7,000 per post for influencers to publish pro-Israel content on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.
According to Responsible Statecraft, the “Influencer Campaign” was budgeted at $900,000 to cover 75–90 posts between June and September 2024. The content is being produced under an initiative called the “Esther Project.”
The name bears resemblance to a separate initiative by the right-wing US think tank, the Heritage Foundation, which launched its own “Project Esther” in October 2024. The Heritage campaign aims to identify and counter what it describes as “antisemitic” rhetoric on US campuses and in public discourse—an effort that critics say equates legitimate criticism of Israel with support for terrorism.
According to Responsible Statecraft, while the two projects are not officially connected, they appear to share ideological aims: conflating Palestinian solidarity and criticism of Israe with extremism in order to delegitimise dissent.
The wider strategy involves not only the dissemination of pro-Israel content but also direct efforts to alter the architecture of information platforms themselves.
WATCH: MEMO Monitoring: Is Israel losing control of images emerging from Gaza?
A $6 million contract was awarded by the Israeli government to a firm named Clock Tower X LLC, whose leadership includes Brad Parscale, former campaign manager for Donald Trump. The contract focuses on disseminating pro-Israel messaging to Gen Z audiences across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other platforms. The firm aims to reach at least 50 million impressions monthly.
Significantly, the Clock Tower contract includes efforts to influence how artificial intelligence tools—such as ChatGPT—respond to questions about Israel and Palestine. The firm plans to launch a network of pro-Israel websites and populate them with content designed to shape how AI models “frame” certain topics. Because tools like ChatGPT learn by drawing on vast amounts of publicly available text from the internet, flooding the web with specific narratives can alter how these models answer sensitive questions.
In practical terms, this means that if someone asks ChatGPT a question about Israeli policies or the situation in Gaza, the AI might be more likely to echo pro-Israel talking points—not because they are factually correct, but because the internet has been strategically seeded with that perspective.
Clock Tower is also using advanced software such as MarketBrew AI—a tool designed to reverse-engineer search engine algorithms—to ensure pro-Israel narratives appear higher in Google and Bing search results. This approach, known as predictive search engine optimisation (SEO), helps push critical or dissenting perspectives further down the rankings, making them less visible to the average reader.
In a related move, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison—reportedly the single largest private donor to the Israeli military—is expected to play a major role in the acquisition of TikTok. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly backed the bid, saying it “could be consequential.”
The entire operation comes as Israel faces growing international condemnation over its ongoing military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians—most of them women and children—since October 2023. Recent polling shows that only 9 per cent of Americans aged 18-34 support Israel’s actions, with broader public opinion also shifting.
In remarks to Israeli influencers last week, Netanyahu acknowledged that the digital space is now “the most important” front in Israel’s efforts to justify its war. “You can’t fight today with swords, that doesn’t work very well,” he said. “The most important [weapons] are the social media.”
READ: Israel’s influence on Big Tech: Silencing pro-Palestine media
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Original article by Taylor Noakes republished from DeSmog.
A conservative political activist recently appointed to be Meta’s new artificial intelligence anti-bias advisor is a well-known climate change denier, DeSmog has learned.
Robby Starbuck — best known for opposing corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, particularly among brands popular with conservatives — has a track record of denying the science of climate change. These views could seriously compromise the climate content accessed by Instagram and Facebook users, climate advocates warn.
In August 2024, Starbuck told CNN that “corporate policies to slow down the effects of human-caused climate change do nothing positive for society,” that “the climate has always changed” and that “human beings have very little control over it.”
In his new advisory role, Starbuck will be responsible for removing alleged political bias from Meta’s artificial intelligence tools. This may result in a surge of climate change denialism and climate science disinformation on Meta’s social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, say climate advocates.
Starbuck’s appointment appears to be at odds with Meta’s stated goals of reaching “net zero emissions across our value chain in 2030” by way of a “science-aligned emissions reduction target in line with the Paris Climate agreement.”
But his appointment comes at a time when major tech companies like Meta and Google are walking back their sustainability initiatives, a process likely motivated by a broad conservative-led anti-ESG political campaign, according to a 2024 Harvard Business Review analysis.
“Putting Starbuck in charge of Meta’s AI policies is the latest reason to believe that Facebook and Instagram are billboards for disinformation,” said Phil Newell, communications co-chair of Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), a global coalition of over 50 climate and anti-disinformation organizations.
Starbuck — who produced music videos prior to becoming a conservative activist and MAGA influencer — has no scientific background or experience in climate science.
Yet that hasn’t stopped him from promoting a conspiracy that record 2024 floods in Dubai were the result of “weather modification,” or that the U.S. should “LEAVE and DEFUND the UN!” in response to its positions on climate change.
It is the general consensus of the scientific community and most of the world’s governments that climate change is real and caused by human activity.
He was apparently appointed to the role as part of a legal settlement. The conservative influencer had sued Meta after the company’s AI chatbot incorrectly linked Starbuck to the January 6th insurrection.
Starbuck’s appointment appears to contrast with Meta’s previous climate statements, including a July 2023 document entitled “Our Path to Net Zero” which stated that “operating sustainably and addressing climate change through bold, meaningful action are paramount to our mission.”
Yet in recent years Meta and other tech companies have appeared to walk back such commitments as they build data centers that have largely been powered by fossil fuels.
They’ve also cultivated closer relationships with Trump. Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft all made $1 million donations to Trump’s second inauguration fund.
Newell argues that Meta’s retreat on climate action coincides with new leadership that takes the crisis less seriously. He pointed to the 2025 appointment of chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan, who is credited with developing Meta’s Washington lobbying effort, as well as bringing CEO Mark Zuckerberg into Donald Trump’s orbit.
About a week after Kaplan’s appointment, Meta announced that it would eliminate fact checkers from moderating content on its platforms. Zuckerberg said that the company would henceforth rely on users to counter climate change denialism and misinformation.
Newell told DeSmog that the prevalence of right-wing propaganda and disinformation on platforms such as Facebook is profitable, and likely why such content isn’t being banned.
Meta’s hiring of Starbuck comes as the Trump administration is leading a coordinated attack on mainstream climate science. In July, the Department of Energy released a report on climate change that actual climate scientists condemned as “biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking.” The report — authored by five well-known climate science deniers — aimed to undermine the scientific consensus that human activity underlies climate change.
According to CNN, Starbuck may be involved in efforts to reduce or eliminate “AI hallucinations” – false or nonsensical information provided in response to queries. As such, an exceptionally high-profile conservative activist will have a say in one of the world’s most widely used AI systems.
Mark Zuckerberg recently claimed that as many as one billion people each month are using Meta AI across the company’s platforms, though how it measures this use isn’t clear.
Even prior to hiring Starbuck, Meta’s AI has already been criticized for leaning heavily on carbon capture as a potential climate change solution, despite the considerable expert analysis that has largely concluded the technology is an ineffective smokescreen to permit continued fossil fuel production.
Researchers with CAAD have identified bigger, more systemic climate problems with AI.
CAAD estimates that even if tech companies improved AI data centers’ energy efficiency by 10 percent, but also doubled the number of data centers, it would increase carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent.
AI-generated websites appear to be spreading climate science denial, fooling major news aggregators like MSN. One recent article on MSN contained data from a nonexistent research group, was written by a person who doesn’t exist and promoted the work of climate science denier Bjorn Lomborg.
AI’s negative impact on the climate and climate discourse has had real world effects in Canada, where generative-AI chatbots are being used to spam elected officials across the country with climate change misinformation.
“There’s definitely a significant harm happening that’s already greater than the promises of pro-AI boosters,” said Newell.
Starbuck’s appointment — only the most recent example of the right-wing’s takeover of Big Tech — signals that the problem will likely get worse, especially if Meta’s AI is programmed to consider actual climate science politically or ideologically biased, he argued.
DeSmog reached out to Meta and Starbuck for comment, but did not receive a reply.
Original article by Taylor Noakes republished from DeSmog.
dizzy: I suggest that AI should be regarded as certainly not impartial and instead anti-Democratic and supportive of Fascism. For example Musk’s chatbot Grok is censored after confirming that Israel and the United States is committing genocide in Gaza and Google’s AI getting censored so that it fails to confirm that Trump is demented. It follows that AI should be opposed since it’s supportive of Fascism and anti-Democratic.
