Ever hear of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy?
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Me neither.
A pro-Israel messaging website badged with the name of a thinktank that does not exist has published more than half a million words in nine days, built on a commercial platform that promises to optimize content so that AI chatbots will cite it.
The site gives Israel’s position on subjects including the torture of Palestinian prisoners, Israeli war crimes and whether Israel has deliberately starved Palestinians in Gaza, all presented as neutral research.
The New York media production company Piro Inc filed the site with the US justice department this month under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara), a 1938 law that requires anyone working for a foreign government to formally disclose it, as material it distributes for the Israeli government.
The site publishes in the name of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, which apparently does not exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no physical address, and carries no named staff and no bylines on any of its reports. Its own terms of use are governed by the laws of “the state in which the Institute is established”, which they decline to name.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank-israel-ai-propaganda
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Not a good choice of thread title on my part…I thought adding the tag would help but it probably didn’t…
What got my attention in the article was the idea that websites may be specifically tailored to get picked up by AI. Sort of the next generation of SEO. And that people either won’t take the time or maybe don’t even think to investigate what sources the chatbot used. The possibility for mischief explodes with AI.
This post was linked in the Guardian story and flushes it out more:
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On a related note...
Since AI chatbots exploded in popularity and Google started offering AI-generated answers, people who research foreign influence campaigns have expressed concern that some governments may poison AI-generated answers with false narratives. But an experiment NPR conducted with NewsGuard, a company that monitors online falsehoods and issues ratings about the reliability of online news sources, found that popular AI chatbots mostly pushed back against false narratives spread by foreign states. AI summaries that are increasingly found at the top of search engine results didn't perform as well. But overall, they still pushed back against state-spread falsehoods a majority of the time.
NPR also looked at how often AI-generated answers may have uncritically exposed users to false information compared to traditional search results.
The experiment found that AI chatbots outperformed search engines, while AI summaries underperformed. The results suggest that compared with traditional web search links, using AI chatbots with web search access is a "good way for users to start to investigate these issues," said Mike Caulfield, a digital literacy expert at the University of Washington, Bothell, who has tested AI tools for search extensively. NPR's experiment revealed that AI summaries at the top of search engine results may warrant more caution, depending on the product.
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/30/nx-s1-5876436/chatbots-search-propaganda
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