The Israeli government has signed contracts worth millions of dollars in recent months to rehabilitate Israel's standing in American public opinion, both online and offline.
Amid a sharp drop in support from the conservative right, Israel has hired firms to conduct not just "hasbara [public diplomacy] campaigns" but also campaigns targeting millions of Christian churchgoers, bot networks to amplify pro-Israel messages online, and efforts to influence both search results and the responses given by popular AI services like ChatGPT.
The largest of the new hasbara contracts was signed in August with a firm called Clock Tower X, owned by Brad Parscale
According to the filing, Parscale's company will produce "at least 100 core pieces of content per month" - including videos, audio, podcasts, graphics and text - and "5,000 derivative versions" monthly, aiming for 50 million impressions a month.
Eighty percent of the content will target young Americans on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Campaign messages will be distributed via Salem Media Network, a conservative Christian media group that owns more than 200 radio stations and websites.
Another Israeli campaign, commissioned for the Foreign Ministry, was proposed by Show Faith by Works, owned by Republican consultant Chad Schnitger, an evangelical operative connected to the Christian right.
The filings for the proposed campaign explain that the messages will reach their audience through "the largest geofencing campaign in U.S. history" โ a pitch to map the physical perimeters of every major church and Christian college in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado during worship hours, identifying attendees using commercial data, tracking them, and continuing to target them with relevant ads.
The campaign would use such tools to identify, tag, and target potential Christian audiences with messages from Israel's Foreign Ministry
I got this text the other day. Don't really feel like uploading the propaganda video but it's claiming Hamas is doing all the killing in Gaza