The inspiration: covert advertising on the Internet
Straight out of Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign Ministry: a new Internet Fighting Team!
Israeli students and demobilized soldiers get paid to pretend they are
just regular folks and leave pro-Israel comments on Twitter, Facebook,
YouTube and other sites. The effort is meant to fight the “well-oiled
machine” of “pro-Palestinian websites, with huge budgets… with content
from the Hamas news agency.” The approach was test-marketed during
Israel’s assault on Gaza, and by groups like Give Israel Your United Support,
a controversial effort to use instant-access technology to crowd-source
Israel advocates to fill in flash polls or vote up key articles on
social networking sites.
The Foreign Ministry admits that the inspiration comes from none
other than the much-reviled field of compensated commercial talkback:
employees of companies and public-relations firms who post words of
praise on the Internet for those who sent them there – the company that
is their employer or their client. The professional responders normally
identify themselves as chance readers of the article they are
responding to or as “satisfied customers” of the company they are
praising.
Will the responders who are hired for this also present themselves as “ordinary net-surfers”?
“Of course,” says Shturman. “Our people will not say: ‘Hello, I am
from the policy-explanation department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry
and I want to tell you the following.’ Nor will they necessarily
identify themselves as Israelis. They will speak as net-surfers and as
citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be
based on a prepared list of messages that the Foreign Ministry
developed.”
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