• The r/Palestine network coordinates across Reddit, Discord, X, Instagram, Quora, and Wikipedia, manipulating search engines and AI models like ChatGPT to spread its messaging — a practice known as “data poisoning”

• The network systematically launders propaganda from US-designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad

• Key subreddits infiltrated by the network include r/Documentaries (20m members), r/PublicFreakout (4.7m), and r/therewasanattempt (7.2m), misleading millions into believing its content is organic

• Through coordinated vote brigading, subreddit moderation, and content manipulation, the network influences public perception while evading platform moderation and legal consequences

• Reddit’s trust and safety team has been repeatedly warned about the network’s activities but has failed to act, allowing terror-linked propaganda to proliferate

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It’s by now a truism that digital propaganda will play a central role in wars of the 21st century. What’s less understood is the extent to which this is already happening. Amid the din about TikTok’s ties to Beijing, little attention is paid to terror groups funded by Iran and Qatar that are linked to extraordinarily effective propaganda networks that span every major social media and information platform.

Since October 7, an online network has emerged that directs content sourced from US-designated Islamist terror organizations — including Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthi movement — across Reddit, Discord, X, TikTok, Instagram, Quora and Wikipedia. The network works with an awareness that its manipulation eventually flows downstream and gets baked into universal platforms like Google search and ChatGPT.

The central locus of the network is a 270,000-member subreddit called r/Palestine. A Discord server with the same name functions as command-and-control for the r/Palestine network, and is promoted prominently on the subreddit. On the Discord — whose new members must undergo an ideological purity test consisting of questions about their views on Israel, Zionism and October 7 — a “Reddit task force” channel coordinates posting to Reddit, identifying “comments sections that need more pro Palestinian commentary,” mass upvoting of anti-Israel posts, and downvoting of pro-Israel posts (a practice known as “vote brigading”). The Discord has separate task forces for Quora, TikTok, Instagram, X, and Wikipedia.

On Reddit, the network consists of no fewer than 110 subreddits controlled by around 30 core moderators who are part of the network. Its central subreddits — including r/Palestine, r/IsraelCrimes, and r/ApartheidIsrael — are topically relevant and built around overlapping ideologies that include anti-Zionism, anti-capitalism, radical Marxism, Islamism, and anti-Western and pro-Iranian-regime sentiment. Other core subreddits in the network include r/Panarab, r/fight_disinformation, r/Global_News_Hub and r/suppressed_news.

But it’s with a cluster of million-member-strong subreddits infiltrated and now controlled by the network that have nothing to do with the Mideast — or even politics generally — that the r/Palestine network is particularly effective, and which illustrates an extraordinary degree of unambiguous astroturfing meant to convince unsuspecting users that there’s a widespread anti-Israel, anti-Western, Marxist movement online. These include, but aren’t limited to: r/Documentaries (20 million members), r/therewasanattempt (7.2 million), r/PublicFreakout (4.7 million), r/Fauxmoi (4.3 million), and r/iamatotalpieceofshit (2.1 million).

The network leverages command-and-control mechanisms, radicalizing messaging and decentralized tactics by exploiting the openness and freedom afforded by these platforms, as well as vulnerabilities in the platforms’ trust and safety operation, which have largely been outsourced to the user-base itself (rather than trained moderators).

But they also use Reddit and Wikipedia’s unique status in relation to search engines and LLMs to spread the propaganda orders of magnitude further.

Data poisoning: LLMs and search

Last year, Reddit and Google signed a $60 million content licensing deal giving Google access to Reddit’s API for LLM training and search purposes. OpenAI announced a similar partnership last May. (Google has a similar agreement with Wikipedia.) But Reddit’s significance goes much further than this, particularly for OpenAI, which disclosed in a white paper on GPT-3 that WebText 2 — its dataset of scraped Internet content used to train the model — consists of web pages that have been linked to by Reddit posts with three or more upvotes (“karma”). Just as importantly, OpenAI then used WebText 2 as a template for judging the quality of content scraped from the open Internet. Essentially, Reddit became OpenAI’s filter for quality content. (ChatGPT now crawls the open web, introducing more opportunities for this kind of data poisoning.)

A similar phenomenon is at work on search engines, namely Google, which frequently ranks Reddit posts as the first results on topic searches — something the r/Palestine network has reverse engineered to its benefit. For example, if you Google “hostages collage” (in reference to a grid of photos of Israeli hostages held by Hamas), a top result — when we viewed them, it was placed above a page from the Hostages and Missing Families forum where users can download the collage — is a r/Palestine post: “Has anyone noticed the duplicate images in the hostages collage shown by Israel at the ICJ?” Google prominently features misinformation from other platforms, too. Information from Wikipedia can be found at the top of billions of searches per year, despite its articles being heavily poisoned by bad actors. And YouTube frequently uses Wikipedia as the ground truth for “topical context” it provides for “videos related to topics prone to misinformation,” despite the ability for those articles to be manipulated and affect users in real time.

This on its own is highly problematic, though could be reasonably dismissed as an unintended consequence of legitimate free expression and the benign mechanics of LLM training and search algorithms. What changes the equation, however, is that, at its core, the network is dedicated to covertly spreading propaganda distributed by US-designated terror groups. And this is exactly what the r/Palestine network often does: it sources the content it puts on Reddit (and then vote brigades) from propaganda aggregators like Resistance News Network (RNN).

How Resistance News Network launders terrorist propaganda

Screenshots I obtained seem to indicate that RNN pulls content from a color-coded list of Telegram channels run by US-designated foreign terror organizations headquartered across the Middle East. Many of these channels aren’t available in the US due to restrictions on terror-related content, so RNN’s translation and re-posting of the content represents an effective — if illegal — workaround of US terror law.

While not the sole distributor of content produced by foreign terror groups, RNN is the main one. It aggregates and distributes content from US-designated groups in Israel-Palestine, including Hamas, the group that launched the October 7 attacks, during which its militants deliberately killed children, and for which Human Rights Watch accused it of war crimes; Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which participated in the October 7 attacks alongside Hamas and is known for its indiscriminate rocket fire targeting civilian areas in Israel; Martyr Abu Mustafa Brigades, the armed wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which also participated in the October 7 attacks; and many more. In Iraq, RNN pulls from around a dozen channels, including Kataeb Hezbollah, which has engaged in a sustained campaign of rocket and drone attacks against US bases and assets in the region, and Scream of Al-Quds Brigades, which is part of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq. In Yemen, RNN aggregates at least six channels of major terror groups, including the Houthis.

In one example of its content aggregation, RNN published an English translation of a battlefield message from Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades (the military wing of Hamas; it played a leading role on October 7) which read, “Our fighters…in the West Bank are engaged in fierce clashes with enemy soldiers using automatic weapons near the city’s Main Street.” In another instance, RNN translated and published a post by Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which participated in the October 7 attacks and is designated as a terror organization by the US, EU, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and Israel due to its involvement in suicide bombings, shootings, and rocket attacks targeting Israeli civilians: “We are engaged in fierce clashes with the zionist enemy forces storming the city, with machine guns.”

RNN has a particularly tight relationship with Samidoun, which the US government classifies as a terror entity, with the Treasury Department calling it a “sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the PFLP” (Khaled Barakat, a PFLP senior leader, co-founded Samidoun in 2011). After RNN’s Telegram was banned in the EU last August, Samidoun was instrumental in helping them reconstitute, publishing statements on behalf of RNN and directing users to the group’s mirror channel. Samidoun’s efforts to revive RNN after the ban reveal the extent to which it is connected to — and perhaps reliant on — RNN.

The terrorist propaganda to Reddit pipeline

On Reddit, terror group propaganda aggregated by RNN is able to tunnel under the walled gardens of Telegram and into the groundwater of public debate. In one case, a user in r/israelexposed (68,000 members), a subreddit controlled by the r/Palestine network, posted a quote about the alleged detention of a Palestinian boy under the title “Israeli soldiers abduct and beat children.” The post was a direct quote from RNN, which was cited as the source. The same text and video were also posted in r/IsraelCrimes (54,000 members), also controlled by the network. While the content of the clip can be interpreted in different ways, the post is one of many examples of how the r/Palestine network funnels content from RNN onto Reddit.

In the r/TrueAnon subreddit (60,000 members), also controlled by the group, a user posted a screen grab of a message from the head of the Houthis posted in the group’s Telegram channel: “I call on America to send more MQ9 drones, as Yemeni air defenses enjoy grilling them.” The same account previously posted a “Guide to Palestine Resistance groups posted by RNN,” which featured a screen grab of an explainer on Hamas’ Al-Qassam brigades, which led the October 7 atrocities, broken down into sections: “Who are they?”, “Notable figures,” “Where are they most active” and their “Arsenal.” The last line of the post, taken directly from RNN, reads, “Together, we are united until liberation.”

The activity coordinated by the network is not restricted to posting content online. In fact, the network frequently promotes demonstrations and rallies organized by US-designated terror groups on Reddit. In December, after Samidoun was designated a terror entity, an account tied to the network posted an image from a rally organized by Samidoun in Brazil with the title “Free Palestine!” and the caption “Today in São Paulo BR.” A post like this would normally be an unambiguous example of free expression if it weren’t for the fact that Samidoun is a front organization for the PFLP designed to fundraise from a Western audience. In another example, one of the network’s highly influential moderators, u/Sabbah, directly sources Samidoun content about a demonstration it organized in New York City in a r/Palestine post.

The promotion of content from foreign terror organizations on Reddit, including by top moderators, raises serious legal concerns. U.S. “material support” laws prohibit aiding terror entities, including spreading propaganda, training guides, or recruitment tools — forms of speech not protected by the First Amendment. (Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act also does not shield platforms from criminal liability in such cases.)

This poses a major risk for Reddit. Despite this, sources with direct knowledge told me Reddit’s trust and safety executives have repeatedly failed to address the issue adequately, even though they’re aware of it. These sources told me that dozens of attempts to alert the company about the pipeline were systematically ignored and sidelined. On one occasion, I was told, Reddit senior trust and safety team members — including the VP of Data Science and Safety — openly laughed at issues they raised.

How the network operates

The backbone of the r/Palestine network is a group of moderators who control dozens of overlapping subreddits, with r/Palestine as the central hub. These users co-moderate the core group of ideological subreddits, like r/IsraelCrimes, r/palestinenews, and r/ApartheidIsrael, where the content is dedicated to intensive and sustained anti-Israel messaging.

The moderator network is key, since Reddit mods hold sweeping authority over their communities, with the ability to remove posts, ban users, dictate discussion rules, and control visibility through pinned posts and automated filters. They can shape narratives by approving or suppressing content, restricting participation with account age and karma requirements, and even preemptively censoring topics using Automoderator.

Much of the network’s influence lies in popular subreddits that, nominally, have nothing to do with Israel. For example, u/Sabbah, the highly influential member of the network mentioned previously, moderates topically relevant subreddits like r/Palestine, r/IsraelCrimes, r/Palestinians, r/palestinenews, r/ApartheidIsrael, and r/Panarab. However, Sabbah also moderates r/Documentaries, r/therewasanattempt, r/PublicFreakout, r/IRLEasterEggs, r/ToiletPaperUSA, r/Thatsactuallyverycool and r/boringdystopia — a cluster of unrelated, large subreddits that have been captured by the network.

The network includes moderators like BlueberryBubblyBuzz (who also operates another account in the network called Kumquat_conniption), ohhyouknow, PlenitudeOpulence, Falafel1998, _makoccino_, and dozens of others, many of whom also moderate the r/Palestine Discord server. Clustering together as mods gives the group effective control over some of the biggest subreddits on the site. As of the time of this writing:

• On r/therewasanattempt (7.2 million members), Sabbah, Kumpquat_conniption, ohhyouknow, BlueberryBubblyBuzz, PlenitudeOpulence, and usernameoverloaded are some of the most active human (i.e. non-bot) moderators.

• r/PublicFreakout (4.7 million members) is moderated by Sabbah, --intifada--, PlenitudeOpulence, ohhyouknow, Kumquat_conniption, and BlueberryBubblyBuzz. The former two have what amounts to admin privileges (their permission level is “everything”).

• On r/MorbidReality (1.1 million members), Sabbah, Kumquat_conniption, BlueberryBubblyBuzz, PlenitudeOpulence, and ohhyouknow make up the majority of the subreddit’s human moderators.

• r/ToiletPaperUSA (440,000 members) is moderated by Sabbah, Kumquat_conniption, and BlueberryBubblyBuzz, all of whom have ‘admin’-level moderation privileges.

• r/Thatsactuallyverycool (277,000 members) is moderated by Sabbah, Kumpquat_conniption, BlueBerryBubblyBuzz, Falafel1998, and PlenitudeOpulence, all of whom have ‘admin’-level moderation privileges

• On r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM (184,000 members), Sabbah, Kumquat_conniption, BlueberryBubblyBuzz, PlenitudeOpulence, and Falafel1998, are moderators, all of whose permission level is “everything.”

• r/boringdystopia (94,000 members) is moderated by Sabbah, Kumquat_conniption, BlueberryBubblyBuzz, _makoccino_, Falafel1988, ohhyouknow, all of whom have ‘admin’-level moderation privileges.

r/therewasanattempt, a subreddit originally meant for funny ‘fail’ content, and which has over 7 million members, features as its main banner an archery target in the colors of the Palestinian flag with the words “Free Palestine” ringed around it and Israel in the bull’s eye. (The subreddit’s icon is this same target with the Israel bull’s eye.) The main banner previously featured the phrase “From the River to the sea, Palestine will be Free.” The subreddit’s sidebar recommends network-controlled r/Palestine, r/PublicFreakout, r/boringdystopia, and several more.

The sheer volume of posts in r/therewasanattempt obscures a steady tempo of anti-Israel content. For example, a recent post’s caption was “[there was an attempt] to support Palestine” featuring a video of the protestor who rushed the field with a Palestinian flag during the last Super Bowl halftime show captioned, “Fearless Protester Charges Field Waving Palestinian Flag During Super Bowl Half-Time Show.” Two days before, there was a post featuring the caption, “[there was an attempt] To appear as the world’s most powerfull [sic] country” showing an image of Trump pulling out a chair for Netanyahu. One day prior came a post with the caption “[there was an attempt] To argue that opposing ethnic cleansing makes you antisemitic.”

The extent to which other network-controlled subreddits are so obviously astroturfed would be hilarious if moderators weren’t using them to distribute propaganda made by terrorists. A mod announcement titled “We’re a pro-Palestine, leftist subreddit!” is pinned to the top of r/ToiletPaperUSA; every other post on r/PublicFreakout is protest footage; the pinned post on r/boringdystopia is a list of ways to donate to Palestine (which includes a link to r/Palestine’s fundraising page), and its recommended subreddits include r/Palestine, r/IsraelCrimes, and other network-controlled subreddits.

One of the biggest non-relevant subreddits controlled by the network — and one that, at 20 million members, is among the most popular subreddits on the site — is r/Documentaries. Co-moderated by Sabbah, Kumquat_conniption, BlueberryBubblyBuzz, Falafel1998, ohhyouknow, PlenitudeOpulence and another member of the network, PalRep, the subreddit is dominated by the r/Palestine network, its members constituting eight out of the subreddit’s 14 non-bot moderators.

A glance at r/Documentaries content shows what you’d suppose: links to documentaries, mainly on YouTube. Woven into these videos, however, is a steady through-line of anti-Israel or pro-Palestine propaganda on a cycle that separates them by mere days — in some cases, no more than a single day. No other topic or theme on r/Documentaries receives this persistent and intensive focus.

Examples include films like: “The Palestinian,” which features Yasser Arafat asserting that the only solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is the “liquidation” of Israel; “This is Gaza,” which spotlights Palestinian suffering in the Strip; “How Ethnic Cleansing Created Israel”; “Holy Redemption: Stealing Palestinian Land”; “Breaking from Zionism: Jewish Voices for Justice”; “Germany’s blind support for Israel” (caption: “shedding light on one of the main actors behind this genocide”) and “How The Wars On Gaza Create Massive Profits.”

Given the prominence of Israel/Gaza in the news, you might think the content on r/Documentaries is organic. But this is not the case. Sabbah — one of the primary moderators of r/Palestine subreddit, Discord server and multiple nodes in the network — brigades upvotes for posts featuring anti-Israel videos to ensure these posts end up positioned prominently.

And that the six subreddits recommended by r/Documentaries are exclusively controlled by the network also suggests blatant astroturfing, and effectively makes r/Documentaries the top of a multi-step funnel that sends users into ever more topical network subreddits, each of which contains successively more terrorist-sourced propaganda.

r/Documentaries recommends the slightly smaller r/therewasanattempt →

r/therewasanattempt recommends r/BoringDystopia (and r/Palestine) →

r/BoringDystopia recommends both r/Palestine and r/palestinenews, and so on

Generally, the pattern plays out across all the network’s subreddits: subreddits with massive membership funnel users to — and supercharge the growth of — a stepladder of ever more extreme subreddits, always leading back to one of the group’s core subreddits like r/Palestine, r/IsraelCrimes, and others.

Sabbah — and other key moderators who belong to the r/Palestine propaganda network — was the first member of the network to join r/Documentaries, in the weeks after October 7 in his case. Ohhyouknow, Kumquat_conniption, and PlenitudeOpulence joined four days later. The other r/Palestine network members joined in the subsequent weeks and months. The only moderators of r/Documentaries who are not members of the r/Palestine network joined between 2015 and 2016.

Despite having nearly a decade less seniority in r/Documentaries than the previously existing moderators, Sabbah was made the subreddit’s top mod (the first listed in the moderator side panel). This gives him a raft of powers, including the ability to remove every other moderator from the subreddit.

This network extends far beyond Reddit. Key members serve as ligatures connecting the network’s activities on Reddit, X, Discord and Quora.

Among these users is Zei_Squirrel, a radical, Hamas-aligned account on X (272,000 followers), Discord, Reddit and Instagram. Zei_Squirrel — whom I previously identified as being crucial to Wikipedia manipulation efforts based out of a Discord server called Tech For Palestine — moderates r/NewsandPolitics (a subreddit in the r/Palestine network), and is also approved to create Community Notes on X. Zei_Squirrel is active on the r/Palestine Discord server, where they coordinate other members of the network to manipulate Community Notes by having them rate potential notes as “Helpful” or “Unhelpful.”

The r/Palestine network oversees similar activity on Quora. There, an r/Palestine operative, a Quora power user called Handala whose content has around 7 million views, posts answers to questions like, “What is the Palestinian history that you think every Palestinian needs to realise?”

Handala — who, according to a Quora AMA organized by r/Palestine, has created around 1,300 articles that have reached 58 million people on Quora, X, and Reddit — includes a link in his bio to the “Palestine Community on X,” which is organized and operated by the r/Palestine network.

The network boosts his profile and activities on Reddit with promotional posts, in addition to fundraising for him. Seeing him as a valuable asset, r/Palestine provides back-office-type support, for example, transferring Handala’s Quora articles to Reddit and the Palestine Community on X. The group also uses the r/Palestine Discord to coordinate upvoting of Handala’s articles on Quora, and, in at least one instance, claimed to have mass copy-pasted Handala’s articles to Wikipedia, to ensure further reach.

The r/Palestine network is not only succeeding but growing rapidly. The pipeline it operates carrying propaganda from terror organizations into the open sea of the Internet suggests that very little about the network is organic. That, rather, is part of the illusion of a groundswell of popular sentiment that just happens to think and speak about this issue in a given way.

Good propaganda has varying objectives and standards. In some cases, it’s to sow just enough doubt to create a wedge. In other cases, the aim is to cajole or convince, or intimidate opposition into silence. What’s unique to r/Palestine is that it’s likely the first major propaganda effort that brings to bear the full range of digital platforms and capabilities, from messaging apps like Telegram to the forum modality of Reddit, the group discussion of Discord, and amplification of ancillary networks like X and Quora.

The truth is that the network is doing what propaganda is designed to do — influence masses of people without them knowing. Its success in camouflaging the network is evidenced by the fact that Reddit continues to deny this is an issue. But that only makes it more effective, giving it a freedom to maneuver that propagandists of yesteryear could have only dreamt of.

While there may be some top-down control somewhere much further up the food chain, the network successfully merges deliberate control with an ability to commandeer existing networks. It’s a symbiotic approach that hijacks the democratic dynamics embedded in spaces where speech and expression are open and free — all performed in service of radical ideologies that seek nothing more than totalitarian control of how we think and what we think about.

— Ashley Rindsberg

Reddit did not respond for comment.