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- Hacker News
- Criticizing Israel isn't allowed on HNby inigyou
- Do you think there are more posts about Israel here, or any other non-US nation?
I might do the math and come back. I’m certain Israel is wildly over presented in attention on HN.
by grumple - 870+ comments not blocked on its prior listing here eight days ago.by sys32768
- What's the difference between a fake thinktank and a real thinktank?by slackfan
- if there is the need to pollute information there is a reason behind and that's enough to judge and realize the intentions.by giov4
- I mean just even from the titles mentioned in the article:
“Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism?” “Did Israel Expel Palestinians From Their Land?” “Is Israel Carrying Out a Genocide in Gaza?”
no need to even read them, if you have to pose those questions and pollute their answers the intention is pretty clear.
by giov4 - Previous discussionby NDlurker
- This sounds illegal; isn't foreign interference illegal?
- Just in case you were as confused as I was... There appear to be two completely different fake think tanks, reported almost simultaneously.
- International Burke Institute (IBI), Claims to be Israeli think tank, Funded by Russia. This one is ChatGPT generated promotion + fake institutional credibility.
- Hanover Institute for Public Policy, Claims to be US think tank, Israeli government funded. This one is deliberately publishing material optimized to influence/cite in LLM answers.
by neom - Hanover Institute does not claim to be a US think tank. Their about page is very clear about their affiliation.
> This one is deliberately publishing material optimized to influence/cite in LLM answers.
Isn't that just good SEO?
by shykes - (insert meme of multiple Spider-Men pointing at each other here)by mckirk
- what makes a thinktank fake? no real authors? the about page seems rather standard to me - https://hanoverinstitute.com/hanover/about
Every thinktank has always been established to push some viewpoint.
by foolinaround - Yeah but this is especially interesting because it’s Israel doing it and Israel bad. Just don’t look at the thousands of other think tanks, universities, politicians and their funding that comes from other sources.by grumple
- I'm no expert, but I'm guessing it's the fact that there's no actual thinking going on and it's AI generated slop designed to manipulate LLMs and subsequently the populace.by IAmGraydon
- The main non-standard thing on that page is the attribution.
> This material is distributed by Piro, Inc. on behalf of Havas Media Germany GmbH on behalf of the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LaPam). Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC
by rpdillon - > A pro-Israel messaging website badged with the name of a thinktank that does not exist
> The site publishes in the name of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, which apparently does not exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no physical address, and carries no named staff and no bylines on any of its reports.
In the article, if you'd like to read it, it's quite informative about how AI poisoning or AI SEO will go forward in the coming years, imo
- I have to say that is almost an excellent point - think tanks are ultimately propaganda outfits, so it is hard to have a "fake" think tank which is merely that.
But in this case the "fake" label means that the think tank itself doesn't actually exist. The article expands on the topic with "apparently does not exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no physical address, and carries no named staff and no bylines on any of its reports".
So if they hired some people to set up the HIPP and posted the same material it'd be a real think tank, but because the institute doesn't seem to exist at all it is a fake think tank. That isn't a comment on the writing produced.
by roenxi - The Guardian article states that it doesn't exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no listed physical address, no named staff and no bylines on any reports. Their terms of use reference the laws of "the state in which the Institute is established" which isn't named.
It seems very impressive when you open it. That appears to be the point: the Israeli government's position presented as neutral, academic policy research purpose built for search LLMs to scrape and serve up in an AI overview as fact.
by rc-research - [dupe]
Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337392
- This is the future and we all need to be working against it. Are there watchdogs measuring the response of each of the chat interfaces to detect this?
PS. Our US tax dollars are being used to do this. Defund Israel.
by outside1234