My recent investigation for Pirate Wires exposed an extensive propaganda network that coordinates the dissemination of content sourced from foreign terror organizations across Reddit. The piece shows how widespread and deliberate the network is, with clear procedures and protocols for vetting new members, communicating online, posting, and coordinating engagement like mass upvoting or downvoting.

But the investigation also accomplished something else: through a series of unexpected developments following publication, it led me down a rabbit hole following the workings of a highly influential node within the Israel-Palestine information war. This was an anonymous person who goes by Zei_Squirrel, who’s amassed hundreds of thousands of followers across multiple platforms, and who directs them in targeted raids on strategically important discourse operations. As I got further and further down the rabbit hole, I began to realize that — taken together — Zei’s tactics illustrate a detailed, comprehensive blueprint for how information warfare is fought today.

By any definition, Zei_Squirrel is a super-soldier in the Israel-Palestine information landscape. But her significance goes beyond geopolitical propaganda (notwithstanding her frantic monomania regarding that conflict), and provides a rare glimpse into not just online propaganda tactics and methodologies, but how individual operators use a combination of disruption, radicalization, personal charm, online celebrity, resource coordination, and sheer manpower to achieve clear-cut strategic objectives on the digital battlefield.

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Zei is known for posting extremist anti-Western, anti-Israel content at huge scale. With 273,000 followers on X, and nearly 6,000 subscribers to her Telegram channel, the operation she’s running is, on its face, clearly influential. She’s as a kind of ligature connecting pro-Hamas efforts across major online platforms — Reddit, Wikipedia, Discord, X, and Substack — which makes her a kind of super-operator for the network.

The Squirrel effect has also spilled over into the world of Twitch streaming, with Zei going after two of the biggest streamers online — Ethan Klein and Destiny. The relatively pro-Israel stances of Klein and Destiny, both of whom are avowedly left of center, has prompted the rabid wrath of Zei, who called Klein one of the “most depraved amoral scumbags [to] walk this earth, an exact mirror-image of every fanatical Zionist” who exhibits “pathological murderous rape-cult depravities.” Similarly, Zei accused Destiny of being a “vile depraved sex creep who has been running a sex cult with the fans he grooms in his community,” and called him the “Jeffrey Epstein of streaming.”

Zei’s manic obsession with sexual crime is far from incidental. Rather — as we’ll see — it’s very likely her overriding strategic imperative. As Zei herself likes to endlessly repeat: every accusation is a confession.

It took Zei just a few hours to react to my investigation with a series of furious, defamatory posts on X. I was a “deranged genocidal Zionist propagandist freak,” and a “deranged scumbag freak.” Zei even threatened me, saying, “I promise you this will end very badly for you,” and called me out on her Discord server, assuming I lurk there.

But what Zei did next was perplexing: she denied running any of the accounts she clearly, obviously, and very publicly runs. She wrote:

some deranged genocidal Zionist propagandist freak called Ashley Rindberg just published an unhinged piece claiming that I am a moderator on some Reddit group and am spreading evil ‘terrorist propaganda’ there…I don’t have an active Reddit account and have never had one. He just made that up. I also have never been active in the ‘Tech For Palestine’ or Palestine Discord, have never had a Wikipedia account or have been involved in ‘manipulation efforts’, am also not approved to create Community Notes.

Nine times out of ten, it’s best to just mute anonymous propaganda trolls. But, as I said above, Zei is no ordinary anonymous troll. A source familiar with her characterizes her as the most important pro-Hamas propaganda account online. Another source believes that, at least quantitatively (i.e. by number of posts), Zei is among the highest volume Hamas boosters. In the last few days alone, she’s extensively praised Hassan Nasrallah, the former head of US-designated terror group Hezbollah killed by Israel in September. When Iran attacked Israel with hundreds of ballistic missiles, she wrote, “Israel being bombed is one of the most beautiful and joyous things I have ever seen so I made a compilation.” She has called Kamala Harris a “Genocidal Zionist Rape Queen,” hurled antisemitic remarks at two BBC reporters, calling each a “deranged unhinged Zionist Jew,” targeted Bari Weiss with ludicrous allegations of murder, and attempt to goad a far-left UK commentator into openly voicing support for Palestinian terror groups. As far back as December 2019, she wrote, “this is my favorite new year’s eve because death to america is trending.”

While Zei’s behavior may seem reflexive and chaotic, there’s tactical logic to her abuse spasms. If you smear your ideological opponents with veritable truckloads of patently absurd claims, you can force them to spend valuable time and energy steering the conversation back to reality instead of addressing the actual issue at hand. This tactic is known as a “firehose of falsehood,” a favorite Russian state propaganda method, itself an echo of the Soviet approach known as agitprop, which mixed hyperbolic accusations with common terminology for ideological enemies in order to taint a descriptive term (e.g. capitalist or Zionist) with strongly negative associations. For example, the communist use of “fascist capitalist pig” or, in Zei’s case (regarding yours truly), “deranged genocidal Zionist propagandist freak.”

But, back to the issue: why would a prominent account like Zei issue such bald-faced lies about her position of influence, when she knows the evidence of her lies is ubiquitous, unambiguous, scattered across thousands of posts, and publicly available?

For example, she claimed she doesn’t “have an active Reddit account and… never had one.” Yet it’s trivially easy to find that on June 23, 2024, a user on Reddit called u/zei_squirrel, using the same profile picture as her X account, posted, “Sheryl Sandberg made a genocidal Zionism film and it’s being heavily promoted by bot and troll farms” to the r/Palestine subreddit (the central node of the eponymous propaganda network at the center of my investigation).

Is someone on Reddit “impersonating” Zei_Squirrel’s X account? If you think that’s possible, you’d have to explain how it happened that on the same day the Reddit account posted about the Sandberg film, the Zei_Squirrel Substack — which Zei’s X account links in her bio — posted an article called “Help counter genocidal Zionist atrocity propaganda,” with the subheading: “There is a massive troll campaign to boost the IMDB rating of Sheryl Sandberg’s hoax, here’s how you can help counter it.”

The Substack article and Reddit post were part of a multi-platform campaign Zei was spearheading at the time to down-rank Sandberg’s documentary, Screams Before Silence — which documents mass rape committed by Hamas on October 7 — on IMDB.com. Zei appears to have pushed this effort most intensively between April and June 2024 across Reddit, Discord and X, as well as directly on IMDB where an account called zeisquirrel left a 1-star review of the film posted the same day she posted the Reddit and Substack posts. The campaign itself was part of her larger, sustained effort to deny Israeli women were raped or subject to sexual violence on October 7.

In addition to those coincidences, you’d also have to explain why this would-be Reddit ‘impersonator’s’ post was about a topic that Zei had been completely fixated on, at the time. For example, her May 25 X thread reads: “last month Sheryl Sandberg, who abused her position at Facebook to cover up actual mass rape for her boyfriend, put out a ‘documentary’ laundering the ‘mass rape’ hoax, promoted by CNN, NYT and Hillary Clinton. Here it is being destroyed and exposed for the vile propaganda it is…”

Within hours of my investigation’s publication, Zei also claimed she isn’t a moderator on Reddit. Yet u/zei_squirrel is a moderator on the r/NewsandPolitics subreddit. (As you can see from the screenshot below, the first post is, predictably, an anti-Israel post being spread by the r/Palestine network.) As of the time of this writing, u/zei_squirrel is still a moderator on the subreddit.

After my investigation, Zei’s lies went on, and on, and on. “I also have never been active in the ... Palestine Discord,” she wrote. (The Palestine Discord is at the center of my investigation; I characterize it as a command-and-control center of the r/Palestine propaganda network.)

On the contrary, a Discord account called zei_squirrel — with the same profile picture as the X and Reddit accounts — has been extremely active on the Palestine Discord over the course of many months. In the midst of her IMDB down-ranking effort, zei_squirrel wrote on June 17 on Discord, “hi everyone. Some of you may know me from twitter, I’m very happy to see a thriving community on discord that is pro-Palestine. I need your help with something that won’t take much time, and should be easy for you all to do”.

After another user volunteered to help, zei_squirrel launched into a lengthy explanation about the Sandberg film, informing other users that Sandberg was slated to screen the film with Kamala Harris at the White House that day. After noting that the film’s IMDB rating was rising, she wrote:

I’ve been making sure to use my Telegram community to keep [the film’s rating] as low as possible with negative reviews as well, and that has worked for months now, but they’re successfully countering that. So what I need from all of you is very simple: if you have an IMDB account, or can spend a few seconds to make one with a throwaway email, please 1-star rate this vile depraved genocidal hoax film here [link].

Zei_Squirrel went on to coach members of the r/Palestine Discord server on how to down-rank the film, including by indicating that positive reviews of the film contain spoilers, which would have the effect of hiding them from view and downrating positive reviews as unhelpful. As of the time of this writing, all of the film’s positive reviews are now marked “Spoiler” while none of the negative reviews are.

A few days later, on June 22, while still pushing the IMDB campaign, Zei chatted with others in the Palestine server about what she described as Israeli “rape theater” concerning the October 7 rapes committed by Hamas. The same day, she posted a tweet claiming that Naama Levy, the Israeli soldier filmed being pulled from a jeep with bloodied sweat pants by a Hamas commando on October 7, had not been raped.

It’s darkly hilarious how blatant Zei’s lies were in the aftermath of my piece. For example, she also claimed she’s “never been active in the ‘Tech For Palestine’ ... Discord,” as I had previously reported, even though the same Discord account called zei_squirrel that’s been active in the Palestine Discord server is also currently active in the Tech for Palestine (TFP) server, also instructing its members on how to brigade Sandberg’s documentary.

One week before the Reddit post about the Sandberg film, Zei wrote on the TFP server, “anyone here who has an IMBD [sic], or can make one with a throaway [sic] email, please do so and rate the ‘Screams Before Silence’ genocidal atrocity propaganda hoax documentary with a 1 star here: [link]”.

And the day before the u/zei_squirrel Reddit post, Zei posted to the TFP Discord, “is there any other way to boost the IMDB campaign that I haven’t thought of? Any accounts we can ask to post about it on Instagram?”

My reporting on TFP revealed that Zei was a central locus for efforts to manipulate Israel-Palestine Wikipedia articles, another point Zei now denies. And yet, on May 19, Zei appeared in the TFP Discord saying, “Hi there,” to which one of the moderators responded, “welcome zei squirrel, love your work [clapping emoji].” Her next message was, “do you have a specific Wikipedia focused room?” In response, another TFP Discord user wrote, “Here you go!” and supplied the link.

The next day, she announced herself in that very room, officially called tfp-wikipedia-collaboration, saying, “hi there, here now.” In the next message, she wrote, “...as you know I’m also working on a wikipedia group to work on countering propaganda, and it’s now getting into the next phase. I’ll be in here as well and follow what’s going on, in case there’s any overlap, but it’s important to keep this as decentralized and organic as possible to avoid it being used against us…”

The “Wikipedia group” that Zei_Squirrel referenced was an effort she had begun weeks before. “Zionists are organizing on Wikipedia to launder their genocidal atrocity propaganda lies,” she had posted on X. “If you want to help counter that with facts and are an editor and know how Wikipedia works, email me. I will ensure your anonymity: zei.squirrel@gmail.com.”

The same day, Zei posted an almost identical version of the message to her Telegram channel, writing:

I’m setting up a separate group to coordinate action on countering Zionist propaganda lies with facts on Wikipedia, as apparently no one else is fucking doing it and is allowing 5 Zionist cunts to spread their propaganda on a daily basis on their with zero pushback. If you’re familiar with Wikipedia, are an editor there, or want to contribute to this and ideally have an account with some edit history, email me here so you can be part of this group: zei.squirrel@gmail.com.

In the initial hours after my investigation was published, Zei also tweeted that I “just made up that [she is] manipulating… Community Notes in servers she is not active in and [doesn’t have accounts for].” Yet on June 17, the day she was pushing the IMDB down-ranking campaign in the TFP Discord, she also began directing Discord users to Community Notes. Concerning an X post on Hamas sexual violence, she wrote: “btw for anyone here who is in community notes, if you can help rate these as unhelpful and helpful that would be great.”

The tweet she wanted help community noting was a UN report on sexual violence Hamas committed on October 7. The tweet’s left-most image showed a paragraph from the report stating the UN commission did not find evidence that Hamas commandos “received orders” to commit mass rape on October 7. Zei’s goal that day was to get r/Palestine Discord members to rate as “Unhelpful” a proposed Community Note that stated:

The picture on the left has been digitally altered to omit most of Para. 95 incl.: ‘The attack on 7 October enabled perpetrators to commit SGBV [sexual and gender-based violence] and this violence was not isolated but perpetrated in similar ways in several locations and by multiple Palestinian perpetrators’.

Zei_Squirrel also canvassed the r/Palestine members to rate as “Helpful” a proposed note that stated the original poster wasn’t making claims about sexual violence on October 7, only whether it was systematic and organized by Hamas leadership.

And in case this wasn’t clear enough, Zei’s Telegram account — the one linked to in her X bio — engaged in the same Community Notes manipulation efforts.

From the outside, this prolific web of accounts, tactics, and manipulation may appear chaotic. The fact is, it unambiguously shows that there’s a person online with hundreds of thousands of followers with a singleminded goal of discrediting the mass rape committed by Hamas on October 7 — and apparently, a ton of time to do it.

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By now, it will be clear that all of Zei_Squirrel’s claims in her initial response to me are lies. Zei does run an active Reddit account and is a moderator there. She is on multiple Discord servers, including Tech For Palestine and r/Palestine, where she works intensively to coordinate activity on Wikipedia and X, with the aim of manipulating information flows. These are established facts — ones that, moreover, Zei trades on to exert influence and get access to further coordination channels in the network.

Still, the question raised at the beginning of this piece remains: why would such a prominent account lie so publicly about something so easily disproved? The answer lies in the content itself. As we’ve seen, Zei expresses a fanatical enmity towards Israel, and is very likely a hater of Jews. But over the past 16 months since October 7, one objective has outshined all the others: the attempt to discredit claims that Hamas committed deliberate and coordinated acts of sexual violence on October 7, specifically mass rape. This goal drives the majority of Zei_Squirrel’s most resource intensive and coordinated activities. But that raises another question — why this one issue, at the expense of all others? On this topic, there are two factors to consider.

Mass rape and systematic sexual violence are one of the very few allegations concerning the October 7 atrocities that Hamas has sought to downplay or deny. The terror group has been proud to display everything else — the invasion, the murder, the kidnapping, the torture — which (as we saw with their grotesque spectacle of handing over the bodies of infants in a parade-style performance) they consider to be the very essence of their triumph. Mass rape, however, cannot be defended, even in the eyes of their most fervent supporters. The rampant sexual violence makes Hamas look weak, depraved, barbaric and un-Islamic. That’s the first factor in this equation.

Zei is busy. She posts around 20 times a day. She’s on multiple platforms, generating content, organizing, coordinating, learning, distributing. It’s hours and hours of dedicated, grinding work that takes place on any given day, every day, for years on end. If you look at content creators who produce at this level of intensity, they either start out as, or, as their audience grows, become paid professionals. That’s the second factor.

By coming at me with vicious insults and unabashed lies about her activity on various platforms, Zei_Squirrel sought to deter me, as well as those observing, from looking closer. But if you do look closer, and you add up the two factors above — that the account’s main strategic objective lines up with Hamas’ most urgent propaganda need and the professional-level dedication to this task — a certain conclusion emerges.

Like the traditional variety, digital propaganda is most successful when it appears to be organic. This is the core conceit behind the r/Palestine network. For most of the users in that network, that is indeed true. They believe that what they’re saying is true, and their reasons are no doubt authentic.

For the propaganda strategist, this is the gift of digital media that keeps on giving. In this brave new world, state-level propagandists are able to target and commandeer armies of miniature mouthpieces, at minimal cost and risk. You don’t have to blackmail, bribe, or coerce. You don’t have to start newspapers or magazines. You just have to find pools of susceptible users (no shortage there) and cadres of ideologically committed, hyper-engaged power users to run them.

In decades past, terrorists once hijacked airplanes. These operations were almost never about getting access to the plane, nor even the specific demand (free so-and-so prisoner). Rather, they were about the impression these actions imprinted on people’s minds. In a matter of hours, a previously obscure terror group could scare the public, intimidate authorities, demonstrate operational capabilities, and win the esteem of rivals and comrades. But between objective and result lay an airplane-sized gulf. Digital information warfare has cut out that middle layer. It’s an enormous efficiency, one that (to put it in the parlance of B2B SaaS) massively reduces friction for the user, in this case the propagandist.

On October 7, Hamas achieved a battlefield victory that carried a huge reputational defeat: being seen as nothing more than a band of sick marauding rapists hopped up on amphetamines. This could be fixed, but would require a major effort. As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, Zei_Squirrel is cited by people who have been tracking her accounts as the best of the best in pro-Hamas propaganda. If you put yourself in the shoes of the terror officials running propaganda for Hamas, is there a world in which you don’t tap the very best to perform this vital function? Maybe there is. But it’s not a world that seems likely to me.

— Ashley Rindsberg