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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 Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

The executive order issued by US President Donald Trump Monday evening claimed a legal authority that the president doesn’t have to designate the “antifa” movement as a “domestic terrorist organization,” despite the fact that no central group exists to assign the designation to—but rights advocates said Trump’s claims about antifa weren’t the point of the order.
“This isn’t an attack on antifa,” said Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Healthcare. “It’s an attack on our rights.”
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The executive order states that antifa, a portmanteau of the term “anti-fascist,” will be designated a “domestic terrorist organization.” The movement is comprised of autonomous individuals and loosely affiliated groups who oppose fascism, but has no central organizational structure or leaders. People associated with the movement mobilized in 2017 to oppose the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a nonviolent anti-racist protester, Heather Heyer, was killed by a white supremacist who rammed a car into a group of demonstrators.
In the order, the president pinned blame for a “pattern of political violence” on anti-fascist protesters and organizers and pledged that the executive branch will “utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations—especially those involving terrorist actions—conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa.”
The order was written so broadly, said journalist Prem Thakker of Zeteo, that it suggests “someone recording masked agents snatching people off the streets, or asking these agents what they’re doing, can be deemed a ‘terrorist.‘”
The president has ordered US citizens, he added, “to be anti-antifa.”
With no central organization to assign the “domestic terrorist organization” to, said rights advocates, the executive order will likely be used to crack down on a wide range of left-wing protest activity and speech.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, was among those who noted that no US law or statute gives the president the authority “to designate anything as a ‘domestic terrorist organization.‘”
All 219 groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, such as ISIS and al-Qaeda, are foreign entities, and the designation makes it possible for people who provide material support to those groups to be prosecuted by the federal government.
“This would appear to have no direct legal effect beyond acting as a statement of policy for the executive branch,” said Reichlin-Melnick.
Chip Gibbons, policy director at the First Amendment advocacy group Defending Rights and Dissent, said that while the order “is without statutory basis, a close read of the language mirrors existing FBI powers, such as ‘terrorist enterprise investigations’ into ‘anarchist extremists.‘”
“The order appears to be a green light to law enforcement and intelligence to spy on and investigate left-wing political speech,” said Gibbons. “Given the FBI’s current guidelines, which encourage preventative intelligence in the name of counterterrorism, the FBI will have no problem continuing its sordid history of preemptively investigating political speech under the pretext of thwarting terrorism.”
At The Conversation, Dafydd Townley, a University of Portsmouth teaching fellow, wrote that the classification of antifa “as a terrorist organization could have profound effects on the First Amendment rights of large numbers of law-abiding US citizens.”
“It would be a serious danger to American democracy if US citizens were unable to voice their protest and exercise their right to free speech because of this classification,” Townley wrote.
The designation was announced amid widespread public opposition to many of Trump’s policies, including the deployment of federal troops to US cities to crack down on unhoused populations, immigrant communities, and what the president has claimed is a wave of violent crime—despite statistics showing crime is on the decline in all the cities he’s targeted.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have already responded violently to people protesting raids and arrests of immigrant neighbors, including last week when an ICE agent was filmed throwing US congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh to the ground at a protest in the Chicago suburbs.
“This isn’t about ‘antifa’—whatever that is,” said journalist Erin Overbey on Tuesday. “Trump’s new executive order is written so that anyone protesting against the US government, ICE, or even top politicians can potentially be deemed a terrorist.”
“It’s federal weaponization against free speech and the right to protest itself. Full stop,” she said. “And it’s un-American as hell.”
Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).


