Covert Twitter Ops: Israel’s Latest (Mis)Adventure in Digital Diplomacy

There’s a new front in the social media wars: Israeli university campuses.

In cooperation with Israel’s national student union, Haaretz reported today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office is planning to create "covert units" of students who will fight for the country — on social media, that is. While never disclosing their identities as government operatives, these teams will be tasked with generating posts on networks like Facebook and Twitter about everything from anti-Semitism to diplomatic and security issues to what the Israeli paper describes as the "delegitimization of Israel." Student leaders will receive scholarships for their work.

In short, it’s a campaign to exchange around $800,000 in educational grants for roughly 500 Twitter propagandists. And while the move may be unconventional, it’s just Israel’s latest foray into waging public diplomacy over social media — an effort that, to put it mildly, has produced mixed results.

Israel’s aggressive use of social media can be traced back to at least 2009 and its Operation Cast Lead offensive in Gaza. During that conflict, Israel shut out the foreign media and assumed greater control over the footage released, inadvertently creating a social media sensation with its YouTube channel. The experience taught Israeli officials that social media could serve as a nifty wartime tool and prompted them to expand the military’s social media presence.

So when the Israeli army killed Hamas commander Ahmed al-Jabari in an airstrike last year, it didn’t just inform the media about it — it posted the video of the strike on YouTube and tweeted a warning to Hamas (Israel’s aggressive use of social media during the conflict got even more controversial when pictures of the army’s social media director in blackface surfaced on Facebook):

We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead.

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012

But that of course wasn’t the end of it. Israel’s warning resulted in the following surreal response:

@idfspokesperson Our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are (You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves)

— Alqassam Brigades (@AlqassamBrigade) November 14, 2012

Social media was bound to infiltrate warfare at one point or another, but the Israeli army has proven to be one of the most enthusiastic innovators in this space. When a botched 2010 Israeli raid on a Gaza bound flotilla left nine dead, the army turned to YouTube to carry out a real-time propaganda war, releasing videos of what it claimed were acts of aggression against Israeli soldiers that prompted the violence. Here’s an example of one of those videos, which, amazingly, has over 2 million views:

Israel’s latest "covert" maneuver on social media, in other words, is far from surprising, though the entire thing smacks of a bad spy movie. The idea that 500 Twitter soldiers would be able to make a meaningful difference in the global morass of social media sounds unlikely. In Israel alone there are at least 5 million Internet users.

The man behind the plan, it seems, is far from a social media maven himself. The Haaretz article that unveiled the covert program is sourced to a report authored by Daniel Seaman, the outgoing deputy-director general of the country’s Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Ministry. Seaman is now moving to a new position within the prime minister’s office — the director of "the interactive media unit" — in which he will supervise the covert social media initiative. But Seaman, as Haaretz revealed in a separate report Tuesday, has an alarming history of making racist and stunningly hostile statements on his Facebook page.

Here’s one example from Aug. 8, two days after the anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima:

I am sick of the Japanese, ‘Human Rights’ and ‘Peace’ groups the world over holding their annual self righteous commemorations for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the consequence of Japanese aggression. You reap what you sow.

Instead, they should be commemorating the estimated 50 million Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Malay, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Indonesian, Burmese and other victims of Japanese imperial aggression and genocide. Not to mention nearly 120,000 Allied military casualties who fought to defeat the genocidal Japanese. These are who deserve to be and should be remembered this week.

Here, in a post from May 26, he attacks Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator in peace talks slated to begin later this week:

"Erekat, said his side would only agree to renew peace talks if Israel ceased all settlement activity and openly declared that a future state of Palestine would be created on the 1967 lines adding that this should not be viewed as a precondition to talks but rather as an Israeli duty. Is there a diplomatic way of saying ‘Go F*^& yourself’?"

This, apparently, is the man who will be in charge of Israel’s covert social media efforts. Things look to be off to a roaring start.