A synthetic Israel-funded think tank has published more than 100 articles since it launched less than a month ago.
First spotted by Politico
, the Hanover Institute for Public Policy is run by the American advertising firm Piro Inc, paid for by Israel, and appears designed to generate content for LLMs that are continually scanning the internet to inform their responses, with the goal of tweaking chatbot answers in favor of Israel.
Every few days, the Hanover Institute publishes around a dozen articles related to Israel, antisemitism, and Palestine. Every article’s headline has a question. The articles have no byline, often contain graphs, and cite real sources but do not link to them.
The articles ask questions like
How Much Palestinian Land Has Israel Taken?
,
Why Is Israel Seen as the Aggressor?
, and
Is There a Policy of Starvation in Gaza?
The answers often read like word salad nonsense. “A reader who has encountered the claim as a consensus has encountered something real,” one article said about Israel restricting food supply to Gaza.
“The reframe is the denominator. Six documents from five bodies is a count of assertions, not a change in the kind of evidence available,” it said. “Adding a seventh organization stating the same conclusion does not convert an organizational determination into an adjudicated finding, because the evidentiary route is the same in each case: a body assembling material, applying its own threshold, and publishing.”
The
site’s about page
said the lack of a byline was “the convention at institutional publishers” and that it wants readers to weigh the sources “rather than the author.”
“Accountability for the material is not anonymous,” Hanover said on its about page. “The registrant responsible for distributing it is named in the disclosure at the foot of every page and on the public register at the Department of Justice, where each report is filed. The researchers are not named because a finding should stand or fall on it
