Israel Relaunches, Rebrands Online Propaganda Campaign
The troll farming operation Act.IL has been repackaged as RiseApp.
Israel has relaunched and rebranded Act.IL, an online campaign originally designed by Israeli intelligence officials at the Ministry of Strategic Affairs to harass and intimidate American critics of Israel. Such operations are generally referred to as “troll farming,” though the forces behind Act.IL use softer, more highfalutin language.
Rebranded as RiseApp, the program is operated by Israel’s Reichman University (IDC Herzliya) and, according to the project’s website, aims to mobilize Act.IL’s existing database of more than 40,000 pro-Israel online operatives to counter what it describes as “antisemitism” and “misinformation.”
The Reichman University website describes RiseApp as delivering “fact-checked, expert-led responses” for users to deploy in “social media debates and public forums,” in order to engage in “proactive advocacy” on behalf of Israel. A “dual purpose,” of the app, Reichman says, is that it allows users to flag and “identify emerging adversarial narratives” while “alerting partner organizations” to “develop tailored responses.”
A presentation for the forthcoming app’s interface, posted to the Reichman website, pitches the platform as “empowering and uniting the Jewish community” and includes tabs for “The Useful Idiots” and “Genocide Claims.” The latter would seem to provide users with arguments to combat the consensus of human rights organizations that Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
RiseApp’s predecessor Act.IL was launched in 2017 as a joint project of Reichman Institute and the Israeli-American Council (IAC)—the U.S.-based Israel lobby group founded by casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson and run by Adam Milstein (Tuvia Milsztein), who was convicted in 2008 for his involvement in the Spinka tax fraud ring involving Orthodox Jewish charity fronts—and was operated by Yarden Ben-Yosef alongside other current and former Israeli intelligence officials.
“We work with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, consult with them and manage joint projects.” Act.IL director Ben-Yosef said in a 2018 interview with Forbes Israel. In an interview with The Forward a year earlier, he said of Act.IL’s relationship with Israeli spy agencies: “We talk with each other. We work together.”
As The Forward described the app in 2017, Act.IL would gather “high school students and adult mentors” who complete “social media ‘missions’ assigned out of a headquarters in Herzliya, Israel,” including pressuring social media platforms to censor content supportive of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and critical of Israel, with users getting “points” for each mission they complete.
That propaganda and troll campaign was part of a broader Israeli government operation orchestrated by Gilad Erdan’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs called Concert, whose purpose was to create third party-operated surveillance, censorship, and propaganda firms that could hide all Israeli government links to their operations, which at the time were directed against the BDS movement in North America.
“Ambiguity is part of our guidelines,” the Israeli intelligence officer and director-general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs Sima Vaknin-Gil explained in a leaked 2016 video recording featured in the suppressed Al Jazeera documentary The Lobby, telling a private audience of Adelson’s IAC activists that Israel has established “a civil intelligence unit that collects, analyzes, and acts upon” Israel’s enemies, using data from “campuses… and labor unions, and churches,” calling the program “Israel Cyber Shield.”
Israel Cyber Shield was eventually expanded into a much larger Israeli propaganda program which cycled through the names Kela Shlomo (Solomon’s Sling), Concert, and finally Voices of Israel. It is now housed under Amichai Chikli’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs.
The rebranding of controversial hasbara operations is a documented pattern of the Israeli government and its intelligence services. Before Act.IL launched, Israeli company Psy-Group , also staffed by former Israeli spies and affiliates of Reichman University, ran “Project Butterfly” to infiltrate and destabilize BDS chapters on college campuses using fake identities, later pitching their social media manipulation services to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Psy-Group founder Joel Zamel met Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in August 2016, along with the businessman Erik Prince and a man named George Nader who presented himself as an emissary of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, while a senior campaign aide, Rick Gates, had separately solicited proposals from the Israeli spy-staffed firm for a covert influence campaign targeting Republican convention delegates and Hillary Clinton. When special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russiagate investigators closed in on those meetings, Psy-Group simply shut down and relaunched as Percepto International, while the Israel Lobby insinuated that Mueller was antisemitic for looking into Psy-Group’s Israeli interference efforts.
The relaunch of Act.IL as RiseApp follows the Israeli Knesset’s approval of the country’s largest ever budget for foreign propaganda operations, or hasbara, quintupling funding from 2025 to a total of $730 million. That scaled-up expenditure comes amid surveys showing declining support for Israel across party lines in the United States, a trend Israel correctly perceives as an existential threat to the unconditional funding and diplomatic protection their country depends on.
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