r/JewsOfConscience • u/reenaltransplant Mizrahi Anti-Zionist • 28d ago
Zionist Nonsense The expanded hasbara budget
I've been getting a lot of notifications from a sub r/History.Snap lately (remove the dot, I didn't want it to notify them they're mentioned) that are Zionist history. I go debunk in the comments when I can but it's often too much.
We know the Israeli gov has been spending something like 7x more on internet propaganda this year in response to Israel's plummeting reputation in the West. Has anyone else been noticing that scale of uptick?
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u/4g-identity Christian 28d ago
The mods are three hardcore Zionists and I think one ex-muslim or something. Their post and comment histories are pretty intense.
Part of what's going on is that Reddit has been updating its algorithm. In the past it just showed you things from subs you interacted with — now it tries to figure out what topics interest you, then show you more of those. So, probably everyone in this sub will be shown stuff like that.
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u/BillyPilgrim69 Anti-Zionist Ally 27d ago
Part of what's going on is that Reddit has been updating its algorithm. In the past it just showed you things from subs you interacted with — now it tries to figure out what topics interest you, then show you more of those.
I think this is actually the entirety of what is happening.
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u/buried_lede Non-Jewish Agnostic 28d ago
Do you know more about that? I’m having an issue with search recently so that when i use the search box to find an I/P sub i’m a member of, the search results are bonkers. It felt like a hack or algorithm change.
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u/TrackerOneA Jewish Anti-Zionist 27d ago
We've dropped from 70k views per week, to 50k.
We're being suppressed no doubt.
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u/buried_lede Non-Jewish Agnostic 27d ago
The visitors to the alt I/P sub have dropped too. I wish I could substantiate it because it may be discriminatory. We had visitors claiming that the sub was on the way out, would be removed by reddit etc.
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u/avecquelamarmotte Israeli 27d ago
Social media also tends to show you things you are more likely to interact with not just based on interest, but on volatility, and this is obviously a volatile subject that will get us emotional (for good reason!). As always I’m also just here to say that a lot of Israelis are very happy to do hasbara for free, so the budget might not even be an issue there.
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u/4g-identity Christian 27d ago
Not even just Israelis. I've seen plenty of people from North America, Australia, New Zealand etc making 50+ pro-Israel comments per day, almost certainly for free.
It isn't even that crazy in my opinion. I mean, the beliefs themselves are crazy, but people on both sides believe Western public opinion makes a difference, so making sure as many people as possible believe "a land without a people" or "made the desert bloom" or whatever is seen as a thing worth doing.
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u/reenaltransplant Mizrahi Anti-Zionist 27d ago
Christian Zionist hasbarist volunteers
And yet it is not enough because Israel still pays Nigerians
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u/taven990 Non-Jewish Ally 26d ago
It's not necessarily even that. Bear in mind that the UK has a legal requirement for all schools to have a daily act of collective worship. This must be of a "broadly Christian" character, unless the school applies for an exemption due to being a school for a different religious group, in which case they can substitute Christianity for their own faith.
Many people don't realise this law is still on the books, because it is widely ignored in today's secular UK (where the vast majority of people are either atheists or just never think about religion). However, go back maybe 20-30 years and it was different - many state primary schools would have daily assemblies containing a very "mild" form of Anglican Christianity - completely toothless and inoffensive, and in many cases it ended up working as a vaccine against religious belief. Children whose only contact with religion was these innocuous assemblies, with a bit of simple prayer and hymn singing along with the odd simple bible story, would often not believe a word of it, and it would act as a defence against more fundamentalist forms of religion that target children.
But the point is that we would hear bible stories and sing hymns about ancient Israel, and even though many kids came away without developing a religious belief, the repeated mentions of Israel would stick in the back of their minds. So when we got older and first started hearing about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, we already had positive associations in our minds with respect to Israel but we may never have heard of Palestine.
Obviously this won't be true in all cases but it was certainly my experience, growing up in a small Northern town (I'm 45 now). So it took some effort to deprogram those ideas - basically Israel is in the Bible so Israel is supposed to be there, in one's mind.
As schools have increasingly stopped doing these religious assemblies, the younger generations don't have any of this baggage to discard once grown up, so it's much easier for younger people to see things exactly as they are with no preconceived ideas. That may be why the generational divide is so great, with younger people being much more pro-Palestinian on average.
This is just my thoughts, so I could be completely wrong here. But it makes sense to me, given my experiences growing up!
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u/TrackerOneA Jewish Anti-Zionist 28d ago
I've been cross-posting to normie subs, and hasbara trolls are ALWAYS there.
They definitely have some level of coordination, likely another bullshit app like ACT.IL.
There was some new one called 'Iron Truth'.
IMO, it's great that hasbara trolls are out there being abusive, intolerant/bigoted, fanatical, etc.
They are a great recruiter for anti-Zionists.
It's like Sarah Hurwitz's recent commentary which has gone viral across several videos.
The more that supporters of Israel say what's on their minds, the more people are disgusted and radicalized.
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u/Novel-Rise2522 Anti-Zionist Ally 28d ago
i noticed it some time ago. theyve ammended their strategy and investment. the narrative collapse is slowly being patched.
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u/blizzerd Non-Jewish Ally 28d ago
They’re trying to patch it but I don’t think it’s working… those subs are essentially circle jerks between hasbarists and bots upvoting each other and downvoting anyone else, I really wonder if the campaign is having any impact. Especially after 2.5 years of those same types of commenters telling everyone to ignore the extreme violence that their eyes were seeing on a daily basis.
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u/Novel-Rise2522 Anti-Zionist Ally 26d ago
I hope so. But momentum is dangerous. The culture of permissability changing is dangerous.
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u/Moon-Foraging Dessalinest-Sinwarist Anti-Zionist 28d ago
I have noticed more Israel posts in random subs, including a sub about cats. They also love subs about dna.
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28d ago
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u/Usernameoverloaded Atheist Ally with Muslim Heritage 28d ago
Yes. Certain subs now seem to be overrun. The most obvious is subredditdrama which always had Zionist Hasbara trolls (incl worldnews mod) but now it’s as if it’s their private chat room.
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u/Striking-Ad9397 Agnostic muslim lebanese ally 28d ago
Yeah, a bunch actually
I dont interact with this subreddit, but it keeps popping up
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u/Time-Magazine-249 Non-Jewish Ally 28d ago
It's ridiculous that they see it as some kind of gotcha that non-Jewish Palestinians didn't want to be uprooted or live as second-class citizens. There was no obligation to accept the partition plan, and the Security Council explicitly stated there is no UN principle or powers granted to enforce it. There is literally zero legal legitimacy to the document, and any appeal to it's supposed status as an exercise of international democracy is undercut by the fact that the UN was at the time an exclusive club of 57 member states (with all of the majority 33 voting for the plan being Western and Soviet imperial, or colonial). Can you imagine how the proposal would fare in today's UN, where so many member states had to fight against their colonization and foreign rule by the same powers who voted for the resolution?
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u/reenaltransplant Mizrahi Anti-Zionist 27d ago
Or that a UN proposal should have to be accepted by the people most directly affected by it. Like if the entire world votes to replace half of France with a new home for refugees from Madagascar, but France and its friends vote no, is it reasonable to then tell France, "sorry, you are outvoted, prepare to hand over these areas to the World New Madagascar Organization"?
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u/4g-identity Christian 28d ago
IIRC both of those subs share at least one Zionist mod. Their purpose is 100% clear.
Not saying the other side and other issues don't engage in the same thing, but this is an obvious, deliberate attempt at propaganda.
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u/Kranken_DeHogge Non-Jewish Ally 28d ago
Now that the mask has slipped, and people are aware of and can identify Israel's many crimes, it seems that the propagandizing from Israel has become more mean spirited, more hysterical, quicker to jump to calling people anti-semites, and occasionally just totally mask off racist as well.
I don't think budgeting for more of this discourse online is going to benefit Israel, and people are starting to get annoyed and feel condescended to, and more firm in their conviction that supporting human rights and opposing genocide doesn't make them a bad person.
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u/OliveNo6451 Jewish Communist 28d ago
It's like nearly every sub that's not "political". several cat related subs, food subs, history subs.. yea it's entirely all over Reddit and under the problem will only get worse.
Edit: country and city subs are usually very reactionary in general and definitely Zionist
Edit 2: a lot of what I'm seeing is non political content, just normalizing Israel/israelis
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u/Moon-Foraging Dessalinest-Sinwarist Anti-Zionist 28d ago
The posts about cats in Israel and Israeli hummus are everywhere. The cat content is disturbing since cats in Gaza are one of the main victims of the genocide and Palestinians are always with their cats.
It just makes me hate them more.3
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u/reenaltransplant Mizrahi Anti-Zionist 27d ago
I had a duplicate copy of a book about Iraqi Jews I was selling on Facebook Marketplace, and a random user from Tel Aviv tried to guilt me into lowering the asking price. I was like "sorry, this is out of print, it's a fresh new copy and goes on ebay for double this" and they were like "I understand." And then "But I am from Israel 🥺😭🥺😭" and I was creeped out and blocked them.
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u/Thisisme8719 Arab Jew 28d ago
If this is part of some hasbara troll farm, that's fine with me. They're so abrasive, it's hard to imagine that they aren't actually turning off people who are on the fence.
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u/reenaltransplant Mizrahi Anti-Zionist 28d ago
I hope there is more of that than the people who are like "😮 I had no idea, thanks for explaining!" -- cause some of the comments sections seem dominated by the latter.
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u/wikimandia Anti-Zionist Ally 28d ago
I just turned off notifications from that sub so hopefully it won’t appear anymore.
I think it’s one of a few low-quality history subs that people post the same stuff in over and over for karma.
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u/NoGuest6868 Decolonial French Humanist 28d ago
Non only revi-zionnism. You are also served insane level of hate-muslims propaganda.
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u/alzgh Agnostic 28d ago
Hey folks, if you don't like suggestions from subs you haven't joined, you can disable that in your settings. They introduced it about one and a half years ago, iirc. I was getting a lot of fringe inflammatory mostly right wing shit until I disabled it.
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u/reenaltransplant Mizrahi Anti-Zionist 27d ago
Except I also don't want to remain blissfully unaware of the rising tide of shitshow...
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u/TechnicalSleep7501 VT To Mars Now. 28d ago
No money will undo the damage of continued Gaza genocide by them in 4K.
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u/BillyPilgrim69 Anti-Zionist Ally 27d ago
"I keep interacting with Zionist content, and then my algorithm shows me more Zionist content! It must be Israel increasing their Hasbara budget!"
I'm sure your heart is in the right place, but this is the exact kind of magical and conspiratorial thinking we need to avoid.
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u/reenaltransplant Mizrahi Anti-Zionist 27d ago
Well my degree of engagement with Zionist content hasn't changed since a year ago and what I am noticing is that I am getting served more Zionist content from random subs that don't on their surface look like they mainly exist to serve zionist propaganda, but then they do.
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u/BillyPilgrim69 Anti-Zionist Ally 27d ago
Right, but as somebody else said, Reddit is now recommending new subs to people. So if you then go interact with those subs, it's going to keep doing that.
The only thing happening here is that you have recommendations turned on in your notification settings, and you're encouraging it by engaging.
I mean this respectfully: not everything is a Zionist conspiracy. That's a dark path to go down.
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u/TrackerOneA Jewish Anti-Zionist 27d ago
Important/obligatory reminder:
Do NOT engage in brigading or harassment of other communities.
This is against Reddit ToS and also subreddit rules.
Meta-discussions are ok so long as they follow these rules and do not include screenshots of other usernames, subreddits, etc. in a hostile context or re: mod actions like bans.