Netanyahu Says He Wants To Use Social Media As A 'Weapon' To Secure American Support For Israel.

Netanyahu Brags About Trying To Control Social Media As A "Weapon" In Israel's Information War.

With support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its desired foreign policy in the Middle East getting lower and lower across the political spectrum, especially among young people, Israel will ramp up its propaganda war in order to ensure American support.

At a recent meeting with pro-Israel influencers in the United States, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about his plan to manipulate X and TikTok in order to use them as “weapons” in Israel’s information war.

When asked about Israel losing its base of support on the right, with prominent conservative podcasters like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens taking a more critical turn against Israel, Netanyahu replied, “We have to secure that part of the base of our support in the United States”.

Laying out his plan to “secure the base of support,” Netanyahu said, “We’re going to have to use the tools of battle, the weapons change over time, we have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we are engaged, and the most important ones are the social media”.

Elaborating on this, Netanyahu laid out a plan to take over Tiktok and X in order to turn them into propaganda mouthpieces for Israel, saying “And the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok number one, and I hope it goes through because it can be consequential, and the other one that’s most important is X, we have to talk to Elon, he’s not an enemy, he’s a friend, we should talk to him”.

The “purchase” of TikTok Netanyahu is referring to has been a longtime plan from Israel and its lobbyists in the United States to ban TikTok unless it tranfered over to American owenership, who will then manipulate the algorithm in Israel favor.

As a result of a bill that gives TikTok’s ownership over to American investors, one of the new TikTok owners will be Oracle, the tech company owned by Larry Ellison, the top private donor for the IDF, and a personal friend of Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to the Wall Street Journal, as part of this deal, TikTok’s “algorithms must be created and maintained by an American engineering team.”

Larry Ellison- who will play a large part in controlling the algorithm if this deal goes through- donated $16.6 million to the IDF in 2017, which the Times of Israel described as “the largest single gift in FIDF’s (Friends of the IDF’s) history”.

Along with this, Harretz reported “ (Larry) Ellison, who has known Netanyahu for a considerable time, invited the Netanyahu family to come on vacation on Lanai, the Oracle founder’s privately owned Hawaiian island. The tech billionaire is known to have personally entertained the Netanyahus at least once during the visit, but sources said that he and the prime minister also held several other conversations in private.”

Ellison and Netanyahu are so close that Ellison “asked former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to join the board of directors of the company” Oracle, when he was out of power.

Along with this, journalist Alan Macleod reported that “Oracle sees itself as an activist organization, one whose goal is the advancement of the Israeli colonization project”, explaining that, “Safra Catz, the company’s Israeli-American CEO, bluntly explained that any employees uncomfortable with supporting a genocide should simply quit. ‘We are not flexible regarding our mission, and our commitment to Israel is second to none,’ she said, adding ‘this is a free world and I love my employees, and if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel, then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country, and no one should be surprised by that.’”

Along with Ellison, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz will also partially own TikTok if this deal goes through.

According to journalist Harrison Berger in the American Conservative:

Cofounded by the son of a famous Israel First neoconservative, TikTok’s other new owner, Andreessen Horowitz, is equally aligned with the Israeli government; the firm has rapidly become one of the most active foreign investors in Israel. Impressed by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its various wars of aggression, and its pager attacks against civilians in Lebanon, Andreesen Horowitz launched a recruiting drive to attract the “Elite IDF talent” behind each of those war crimes.

The transfer of TikTok over to American pro-Israel owners comes after a bill was passed that ostensibly stopped Chinese influence over TikTok, but was really intended to censor content critical of Israel on the platform and stop young Americans from opposing funding Israel.

As journalist, Ken Klippenstein reported, the two senators who introduced the bill, Mark Warner and Mike Gallagher, admitted the bill was intended to censor content critical of Israel at the Munich Security Conference, with Warner saying, “I want to see if you’re going to tell the real story” behind the bill and Gallagher adding, “So we had a bipartisan consensus. We had the executive branch, but the bill was still dead until October 7th. And people started to see a bunch of anti-Semitic content on the platform, and our bill had legs again”.

According to NPR, in a leaked memo, Israeli Foreign Ministry Deputy Director General Emmanuel Nahshon, “blamed TikTok’s algorithm, which he claimed favors pro-Palestinian content, for turning young people against Israel”.

An internal state department memo published by Klippenstien said that while Israel “faced a major credibility problem as a result of the unpopular war on Gaza” and that “the Israelis seemed oblivious to the fact that they are facing major, possibly generational damage to their reputation not just in the region but elsewhere in the world” ,Israel belived, “Young people have turned against Israel in large part because the Tik-Tok algorithm favors pro-Palestinian content.”

Mike Gallagher, the former republican representative who boasted about pushing the TikTok ban bill to censor Palestinian content received $135,308 from the Israel lobby group AIPAC in campaign funds.

After leaving office, he went on to become the head of defense business at Palantir, the tech company deeply tied to Israel.

As Middle East Eye noted, Republican senator Mitt Romney admitted, “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature, If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites - it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts”.

The outlet also noted that, “Nikki Haley, another former Republican presidential candidate who last year infamously signed an Israeli bomb meant for Gaza with ‘finish them’, said she believed that simply watching videos on TikTok would make a user antisemitic.”

As Harrison Berger noted, “TikTok’s capacity to totally and instantaneously shatter decades of neoconservative propaganda revealed what Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, would label Israel’s ‘TikTok problem’: that the app exposes a generation of Americans to too much information unapproved by the CIA and Mossad.”

Along with this, Netanyahu is signaling he will use Elon Musk in order to manipulate the algorithm on X in a pro Israel direction.

Musk already has ties with Netanyahu, with Musk taking a tour of Israel guided by Netanyahu early on in the genocide, and Netanyahu inviting Musk to attend his speech to Congress in 2024.

Now, by Netanyahu’s own admission, he cultivated this relationship with Musk in order to have him manipulate the X algorithm in favor of Israel.

With Israel’s support in America reaching new lows, they will ramp up their propaganda war, in order to secure American support, which they need to carry out the Gaza genocide and endless war in the Middle East.

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