by Eliyahu Haddad
Western democracies need to develop and implement countermeasures that preserve democratic values while addressing technological manipulation.
Over the past two decades, several Middle Eastern states—including Iran, Qatar and Turkey—have developed sophisticated digital influence operations aimed at reshaping Western public opinion, especially among younger demographics.
These campaigns, once simple propaganda, now utilize advanced artificial intelligence, social media algorithms and behavioral targeting to undermine Israel’s legitimacy and promote jihadist ideologies.
The operations weaponize the openness of democratic societies, exploiting freedoms of speech and digital infrastructure to destabilize political systems, manipulate information flows and erode trust in democratic institutions.
Key elements of the influence ecosystem
Massive funding and infrastructure: Iran allocates hundreds of millions of dollars annually to propaganda, Qatar invests billions through media networks such as Al Jazeera, and Turkey employs state-backed online troll networks. Together, these form one of the largest peacetime information warfare programs in history.
AI and algorithmic manipulation: Coordinated bot networks and AI-generated content exploit social media algorithms to amplify divisive and deceptive narratives. Fake videos, fabricated war footage and AI-generated images serve to delegitimize Israel and confuse audiences about what is real.
Targeting of youth and academia: Young Western audiences, particularly university students, are the primary targets. These operations exploit social justice causes—such as climate activism and LGBTQ+ rights—to embed anti-Israel narratives and link them to broader progressive movements.
Strategic political impact: Manipulated public opinion has directly influenced Western policy decisions, including instances where coordinated online campaigns led governments to recognize a nonexistent Palestinian state under the illusion of grassroots pressure.
Geopolitical realignment: These influence efforts have repositioned Qatar and Turkey as legitimate mediators in regional diplomacy, despite their support for extremist movements, reflecting how deeply digital manipulation can reshape global politics.
The broader outcome is a transformation of global discourse—where AI-driven deception, digital propaganda, and ideological manipulation redefine truth, weaken democratic resilience and shape international policy in ways that benefit authoritarian and jihadist regimes.
While ostensibly targeting Israel, these operations threaten Western civilization itself. Hostile actors intent on destroying democratic institutions exploit open societies to erode public trust, manipulate political processes and undermine the values sustaining free nations.
Their demonstrated ability to systematically modify public opinion raises serious questions about democratic decision-making in digitally mediated environments.
Intelligence assessments and academic research reveal a coordinated ecosystem of digital manipulation, with Iran, Qatar and Turkey investing billions. Key findings: Iran allocates $16.7 billion annually to defense spending with at least $600 million for propaganda; Qatar’s Al Jazeera reaches over 430 million people as part of a $40 billion U.S. influence campaign.
Stanford Internet Observatory documented Iranian bot networks with 238 accounts producing over 560,000 tweets; polling shows 53% of Americans now hold unfavorable views of Israel (up from 42% in 2022), with only 14% of Americans under 30 sympathizing with Israel versus 33% with Palestinians.
Algorithmic manipulation and AI-powered deception
These operations exploit fundamental social media algorithm vulnerabilities through coordinated engagement–multiple accounts simultaneously liking, sharing and commenting to trigger algorithmic promotion.
Iranian-linked networks achieved cross-platform coordination with “professional branding” across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Telegram, accumulating nearly 1.5 million followers before removal.
Artificial intelligence has transformed influence operations into predictive behavioral modification systems employing GPT-style models for human-like content generation and multimodal AI systems.
Research by Israeli startup Tasq.ai and UC Berkeley Professor Hany Farid identified numerous AI-generated images depicting false Israeli military actions, including fabricated scenarios posted months before conflicts they purportedly depicted.
Documented examples include AI-generated images of bloodied babies in rubble that went viral in the conflict’s earliest days, videos showing supposed Israeli missile strikes, tanks rolling through ruined neighborhoods and fabricated images of Gaza tent cities.
Coordinated accounts simultaneously post identical claims about alleged Israeli war crimes, fake “eyewitness” accounts from nonexistent Gaza residents republished by legitimate news aggregators, and recycled Syrian conflict images falsely captioned as recent Gaza incidents.
The “liar’s dividend” creates the most concerning development—AI-generated content prevalence creating doubt about authentic evidence. Farid said, “The specter of deepfakes is much more significant now—it doesn’t take tens of thousands, just a few, and then you poison the well and everything becomes suspect.”
Real-world impacts: legitimate Hamas rocket footage dismissed as “Israeli propaganda,” actual terrorist documentation discredited as deepfakes, and authentic victim testimonies rejected because “AI could fake that.”
Targeting the next generation
The primary demographic target: Western university students aged 18-29 with high social justice engagement but limited historical or actual knowledge of Middle Eastern conflicts.
Examples of falsified historical narratives include fabricated timelines suggesting Israel initiated all conflicts (omitting Arab rejection of partition, repeated wars of aggression and constant terrorism), false “apartheid” claims (misrepresenting territorial disputes as racial oppression) and invented histories of ancient Palestinian kingdoms that never existed.
The “genocide” and “starvation” accusations represent perhaps the most pernicious misuse of legal terminology. Despite widespread claims amplified through social media, Gaza’s population data directly contradicts genocide allegations. Genocide’s legal definition requires intent to destroy a group “in whole or in part”—no such intent exists in Israeli military operations targeting Hamas infrastructure while facilitating humanitarian aid despite security risks.
University students receive news primarily through social media algorithms rather than direct source selection, making them vulnerable to coordinated content amplification.
Campus activism demonstrates sophisticated coordination, deliberately linking Middle Eastern conflicts to familiar domestic social justice frameworks. The Climate Justice Alliance absurdly and explicitly linked Palestinian liberation with climate activism, stating “the path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine,” systematically ignoring comparable or worse practices by neighboring Arab states.
The LGBTQ+ rights movement demonstrates the most paradoxical co-optation: organizations advocating for sexual minority rights simultaneously supporting Islamist movements mandating severe persecution of LGBTQ+ individuals.
Examples: LGBTQ+ groups hosting “Queers for Palestine” events while ignoring that homosexuality is punishable by death under Hamas rule, and pride organizations incorporating Palestinian flags despite Gaza’s systematic persecution of sexual minorities. These activists rarely acknowledge that Israel is the only Middle Eastern nation with legal protections for LGBTQ+ individuals and anti-discrimination laws.
Digital manipulation driving government policy
Comprehensive polling demonstrates significant shifts correlating with documented digital influence operations. Polling across 24 countries reveals predominantly negative views of Israel, with the U.K.’s unfavorable views increasing from 44% in 2013 to 61% recently. Research indicates these modifications remain stable even after exposure to corrective information, suggesting fundamental worldview changes rather than temporary fluctuations.
Contemporary influence operations employ sophisticated detection evasion: behavior randomization with irregular posting patterns, account aging by operating dormant accounts before activation, and legitimate content mixing.
While Twitter eventually removed 238 Iranian accounts producing over 560,000 tweets, they operated extensively before detection. Current detection systems prove limited against sophisticated operations utilizing authentic accounts, organic engagement patterns and selective information presentation to avoid automated detection.
Diplomatic and policy implications extend to documented electoral consequences and diplomatic relationships. The manipulation mechanisms affecting the highest political levels became evident in 2025 when several Western leaders announced recognition of a nonexistent Palestinian state—a decision traceable to coordinated social media campaigns manufacturing apparent grassroots pressure from Muslim constituencies.
The coordinated nature of these announcements—occurring within days by the U.K., Canada, Australia and Portugal, followed by France at the U.N.—reveals synchronized government responses to what appears to be transnational coordination of political pressure campaigns.
The complete manipulation chain operates as follows: State-sponsored bot networks systematically amplify anti-Israel content targeting Western Muslim communities → Algorithmic amplification creates echo chambers where manipulated narratives dominate → Apparent grassroots organizations emerge, their messaging coordinated through digital platforms → Traditional media reports on “growing community pressure” without investigating digital origins → Politicians respond to what appears to be authentic constituent demands → Foreign actors achieve policy objectives without direct diplomatic engagement.
Intelligence services documented specific operational techniques, including the coordinated timing of social media campaigns with parliamentary sessions, bot-amplified petition drives that created false mass mobilization impressions, strategic targeting of individual MPs through coordinated constituent comment campaigns, and systematic infiltration of community social media groups to inject manipulated narratives.
This represents the pinnacle achievement of digital influence operations—utilizing social media manipulation to create the illusion of democratic pressure, thereby forcing policy changes that serve adversarial strategic objectives.
Trump’s peace arrangement and regional realignment
The relevance of these digital influence operations has intensified with the implementation of the Trump administration’s “peace” arrangement and the entry of Qatar and Turkey as major regional players. These developments represent the culmination of years of sophisticated influence campaigns successfully repositioning these jihadist-aligned actors as legitimate mediators and stakeholders in Middle Eastern peace processes.
Western leaders’ curious willingness to embrace these actors as partners reflects the profound success of the very influence operations documented here—operations fundamentally altering Western perceptions of Middle Eastern dynamics and appropriate policy responses.
This geopolitical shift illustrates how digital manipulation campaigns can achieve long-term strategic objectives that extend far beyond immediate opinion polling. By systematically eroding support for Israel while normalizing jihadist-aligned regimes as legitimate actors, these operations created conditions for dramatic policy realignments inconceivable absent sustained digital influence.
Qatar and Turkey’s integration into formal peace arrangements represents not diplomatic pragmatism, but rather the successful exploitation of manipulated public opinion and compromised decision-making processes—precisely the vulnerabilities this analysis identifies.
Conclusion
The systematic exploitation of Western digital infrastructure by jihadist-aligned state actors represents a fundamental challenge to democratic discourse and strategic stability. The financial resources committed—with Iran allocating $600 million annually to propaganda and Qatar investing billions through Al Jazeera—reflect the strategic priority these regimes place on ideological warfare through technological means.
The sophistication of AI integration, synthetic media production and behavioral manipulation techniques reveals adversary capabilities surpassing most Western countermeasures.
The measurable success in modifying Western public opinion, particularly among university-aged demographics, creates cascading effects that persist throughout educational institutions, political processes and policy development for decades. The co-optation of climate activism, LGBTQ+ rights movements and other social justice causes reveals a strategic understanding of Western political psychology, enabling influence operations to achieve objectives through indirect manipulation.
The Stanford Internet Observatory’s documentation of Iranian networks producing over 560,000 tweets through 238 coordinated accounts, combined with widespread AI-generated synthetic media, reveals a technological manipulation scale that current regulatory frameworks weren’t designed to address.
Whether Western democracies can develop and implement countermeasures that preserve democratic values while addressing sophisticated technological manipulation has become a vital and urgent question—the resolution of which will determine the future integrity of democratic governance in the digital age.
We are witnessing how the entire world’s opinion is being manipulated by advanced social media campaigns to accept patently false and manufactured stories designed to achieve specific partisan political and often military agendas. We are also witnessing how social media has successfully redefined the terms we use to communicate, adapting them to suit particular agendas.
“Genocide,” “Apartheid,” “Starvation” and “Zionism” are examples of insidious efforts to undermine our civilization.
The dramatic effects of sophisticated technological manipulation on society as a whole—whether in academia, media, polling booths or in the determination and conduct of foreign policy by governments—require urgent consideration and practical remedial action before it is too late.
Originally published by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.
Eliyahu (Lee) Haddad is a serial
entrepreneur and seasoned investment professional specializing in
disruptive technologies and financial analysis. He currently serves as
CEO of Dror Ortho-Design, a pioneering AI-based dental technology
company based in Israel and listed in the U.S.
Source: https://www.jns.org/subversion-of-thought-as-a-strategy-to-delegitimize-israel-undermine-the-west/
