Instagram Influencers as Foreign Agents
Israel's army of cyber freaks hired to commit content terrorism.
My second job ever was at a media start-up called Fuck Jerry where I made memes for brands like Tinder and Tostinos. I know, I know, but it was 2018— before the FyreFest scandal and #FuckFuckJerry— and I was in college.
I had been working at the company for under a year when both the Netflix (produced by FJ) and the Hulu Fyre Fest documentaries came out, and I was in the office when news of people speaking out against the company’s policy of stealing content from actual creators dropped. Things quickly fell apart. Clients broke their contracts; coworkers of mine stopped showing up to work. The future of the business wasn’t looking too hot. To salvage what they could of the operation, Fuck Jerry tried to pivot to original content. They hired content-creator duo Zach Sage Fox and Omri Dorani, who together run the media company Fat Camp Films, to build an array of original social content for a variety of platforms. I don’t know if it was successful. I was laid off only a few months later.
I hadn’t thought about either of them in a while, not until I came across a video of Fox walking around the West Bank interviewing people man-on-the-street-style on my X FYP. The video was shared as a sponsored post by the State of Israel. I couldn’t believe it. Why was he the host of this gross piece of propaganda? How did he end up in the West Bank? I had a lot of questions, but it didn’t take long to figure out what was going on.
Zach Sage Fox is just one of many influencers who have begun creating hasbara on behalf of the Israeli government, but his trajectory is representative of the Foreign Propaganda Content Creator Ecosystem™️ at large. Israel isn’t the only country to use Influencer marketing, US adversaries, like China and Russia, regularly make headlines for doing so. However, unlike the slew of conservative social media pundits that were recently indicted for pushing pro-Russian propaganda funded by the Russian government via shell companies, the DoJ doesn’t seem to care too much about curbing Israeli interference. I wonder why.
How can I call this media blitz Israeli interference? Well, to understand that, we need to take a step back.
Most of you probably remember back in May when the chat logs of a private WhatsApp group chat, started at the behest of Barry Sternlicht, was leaked to the Washington Post. The logs revealed that an organized network of over 100 people (dozens of which were powerful businessmen like Michael Dell and Daniel Loeb) were using their influence (and money) to shape US opinion on Israel. It was big news. The Post reported that the group had privately pressed New York City Mayor and Raver Eric Adams to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. But this wasn’t the first time since October 7th that Sternlich called on his band of billionaires to support the zionist project.
In the days following October 7th, Sternlicht reached out to his network asking for individual donations of 1 million each to launch Facts For Peace, a social media campaign aimed to “define Hamas to the American people as a terrorist organization”.
Sternlicht knew what was at stake. “Public opinion will surely shift as scenes, real or fabricated by Hamas, of civilian Palestinian suffering will surely erode [Israel’s] current empathy in the world community,” he wrote in an email chain meant to drum up funding. “We must get ahead of the narrative.”
Sternlicht hired Josh Vlasto, a former advisor to former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, to advise the campaign, and within just a few days, the campaign was launched.
Though Fox had just one of over 100 content creators to join the initiative, he’s become one of the primary faces (and definitely one of the more enthusiastic members) of Facts For Peace. He has gained over 60,000 followers since joining Sternlicht’s campaign— including follows from accounts like Michael Dell, the official AIPAC page, and even Israel’s official Instagram page.
This rise in internet-fame isn’t shocking; Facts For Peace has spent over $300,000 on Meta ads in the past 90 days alone, and, according to POLITICO, is the one of the largest pro-Israel advertisers on the platform. Their ad spend is incredible. Between July 31st and August 4th, Facts For Peace spent between $30-$35,000 on a single post promoting the Nova Experience (the immersive experience brainchild of Scooter Braun that lets you dig through October 7th victim’s belongings) targeted at Lollapalooza attendees. Even though not all of Facts For Peace’s content features Fox, the bulk of those associated with the project have all seen a major increase in audience size.
What is consistent about Facts For Peace is their provocative and inflammatory strategy. Online, the Facts For Peace claims to be a source for “the facts on Hamas, Israel, and peace in the region” (interesting that there’s no mention of Gaza), but in practice, the campaign is clearly no more than the typical propaganda campaign tailored for the age of the viral man-on-the-street interview.
In one video, Zach Sage Fox heads to Washington Square Park with Columbia professor Shai Davidai to ask people trick questions about Gaza. In another, he’s found his way to the West Bank to ask Palestinians if they support Hamas (of course, he later went on Fox News to talk about how Palestinians almost killed him for being jewish). It’s the same shit that all of these right-wing grifters do; Fox trips interviewees up by using double-speak and jumping from one talking point to the next and then edits it to make them look uninformed or ignorant. It’s propaganda 101 and not worth dissecting further right now.
Aside from their influencer-led content, Facts For Peace is also directly engaged in straight disinformation and manipulation reminiscent of CIA-funded projects like Radio Free Liberty.
While researching Facts For Peace, I found two other propaganda efforts that share an IP address with both Facts For Peace and Vlasto’s PR firm, Bamberger and Vlasto: Middle East Intel *update now offline* (not to be confused with Middle East Eye) and Israel Palestine Chronicle (definitely not meant to be mistaken for Palestine Chronicle). Although Middle East Intel doesn’t appear to be active on Instagram anymore (probably because it was obvious to anyone looking that it was not the independent news source it pretended to be), both of these organizations have the same phone number as Bamberger and Vlasto listed on their Meta accounts. I’m not gonna poison y’all with my more conspiratorial thinking, but I don’t think it's a great sign that a former politician is engaged in misinformation operations for foreign governments. That’s just me though.
Dozens of other pro-zionist accounts that employ similar techniques of co-opting the language of dissenting groups, like the cleverly named JewishVoicesForPeace page, have flooded social media. And although I can’t say for certain that any of them are associated with Facts For Peace, circumstantial evidence indicates that they are all operating within the same system— the same executives follow most of these pages, they all collaborate with each other and work with the same content creators, they all shy away from discussing any questions about funding or hierarchy, and many of their videos end up on Israel’s official social channels. To say that the bulk of these efforts are independent would require ignoring major signs.
Since its launch, the campaign has associated with countless influential pro-Israel and Jewish organizations like StandWithUs and the Jewish Agency For Israel (as well as more unhinged organizations like jewhatedb, a page that doxes activists). Members of the Facts For Peace campaign have also hosted anti-palestine protests and zionist dating events, and have been invited to speak on air at various news stations What’s more, in July, creators from the campaign were involved in organizing a Pro-Israel influencer summit put on by Combat Antisemitism Movement and the state of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that taught over 250 influencers how to make good propaganda in NYC. The more I dig, the more intertwined all of these different organizations seem. But this raises a big question. How closely tied to the Israeli government are these influencer-marketing efforts?
While we know that Facts For Peace received some funding from individual donors, it looks increasingly likely that they also received funding from the Israeli government, either directly or indirectly.
In 2015, StandWithUs, one of the larger organizations to work with Facts For Peace creators, was was set to receive $254,000 from the Prime Ministers Office to set up a “social media ambassador program” meant to educate people on how to use social media to promote Israel, according to Seventh Eye.
The nonprofit claimed that the project did not move forward, but the Electronic Intifada had evidence of the opposite. The government intended the ministry’s work to be classified and covert. Later, in 2022, the Israeli government approved a project to inject up to $30 million towards a previously defunct operation that aimed to covertly fund government propaganda in the United States. The plan was to transfer money indirectly to foreign organizations that will spread Israeli propaganda in the countries they operate in; the exact same plan as the ones attempted in years prior.
In the original plan, which was revealed in a series of investigations by The Seventh Eye, Solomon’s Sling (later renamed Concert), a Public Benefit Corp. set up to disperse the funding to outside agencies, was allocated a huge budget of $80 million. Apparently, half of that amount was supposed to come from the state budget, while the other half from wealthy individuals and foreign organizations, primarily in the United States.
But why be covert? Well, U.S. law regarding donations from state entities requires a person to register as foreign agents — a status that has historically deterred a significant portion of potential donors and partners, and has consequently hampered fundraising. The use of Public Benefit Corporations is intended to allay these concerns, though I personally feel like the waters get muddy on legality when you’ve got foreign agents running loose all over social media. Again, that’s just me though.
“The understanding was that it would be easier for them to appear as a PBC than as something that the Israeli government is behind,” explained Ronen Menalis, the former director of the Strategic Affairs Ministry, in a Knesset debate. “In the end, you see a bank transfer from a PBC and not a bank transfer from the Israeli government. That’s the idea.”
The Facts For Peace network looks and acts a lot like the network of Israeli-funded propaganda that Fake Reporter uncovered in a recent, much more thorough study. When you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, it begins to form a pattern that looks a lot like the CIA’s counterintelligence efforts of the past— and as they say, history repeats itself.
The fact that today’s media blitz bears such resemblance to previous operations conducted by the Israeli government is no accident. Understanding that the state has attempted to fund similar covert media campaigns in the past through wealthy American citizens shines a light on the techniques employed by the Facts For Peace campaign, and may start to explain why people like Michael Dell and Barry Sternlicht are funding Israel’s advertising efforts.
What do these wealthy individuals directly get out of the deal? Well, I’m still trying to figure that out, but in general, understanding why so many capitalists support a regime that monetarily benefits them isn’t too tricky.
The reality is that Israel spends a lot of money on defense and technology contracts, and corporations like Dell, Google, and Intel want the hefty payout that comes with securing those contracts. Google and Amazon, for example, recently secured a $1.2 billion joint contract with the state to provide cloud computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology services to the Israeli government and its military. The project itself, known as Project Nimbus, is nebulous and secretive, and has sparked protests from employees around the country. These types of contracts are necessary for a large-scale corporations to continue growing, and few states outside of America are interested in or able to fund such expensive efforts. In many ways, American businesses need Israel’s funding to stay in control of the sheer power they have accumulated.
Also, stray facts to consider:
Facts For Peace LLC was originally registered in 2022 as Fulfill the Promise LLC. Very curious to know what the business was supposed to be.
Former Israeli intelligence asset, Mosab Hassan Yousef, has been involved in creating content for Facts For Peace. I’m sure there is nothing weird there.
If you enjoyed this week’s essay, please consider subscribing to Not An Asset, I really appreciate all of the support.
Oh, before I go: Dave from Fingers was recently on the TrueAnon podcast to discuss the labor trouble over at Sapporo USA’s Stone brewing. Stamps issued by Burkina Faso go hard as hell. Dick Cheney endorses Harris. AI is waging war against writing. And French conspiracy theorists are doing weird shit again.
Another banger