How We Win the Information War

In my previous articles, “The Next Information War Will be Fought Inside AI” (https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-next-information-war-will-be-fought-inside-ai/) and “Understanding the Information War” (https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/understanding-the-information-war/), I named the four phases of the Information War, describing how a narrative moves from captured attention to manufactured consensus to institutional legitimacy to permanent digital memory. I catalogued 32 tactics that are being used by anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activists to control the narrative across the four phases.

We are losing the information war. The danger is that we shrug off the current wave of hate as just another round of overt antisemitism from a history with hundreds of such rounds. How do we come to understand that this time is different, more urgent, and far more permanent? What will lead us to conclude that unlike previous waves of hate that faded within a generation or two, this one is being written into the training data of systems that future generations will ask for the truth?

Nearly every crisis Jewish communities confront today can be traced, at least in part, to our failure to address the digital ecosystem with the urgency it requires. The rise in physical attacks on Jews follows narratives that achieved dominance online before they were translated into real-world violence. The professional isolation of Jews, excluded from associations, guilds, and industries, follows a manufactured consensus that took hold in feeds and search results before it hardened into institutional policy. The harassment our kids are subjected to in schools and on campuses is rooted in the disinformation disseminated on social media. The steady output of biased reports from anti-Israel NGOs and international agencies follows a citation architecture purposely built to launder activist claims into seemingly authoritative findings. The adoption of positions hostile to Jewish interests by elected officials follows the same perceived consensus that has already persuaded their constituents. Each of these harms is downstream of the information war being waged online.

As a community we cannot treat these events as unrelated crises to be managed as they surface. If we recognize them as harms emanating  from a single, contested information ecosystem, we can begin to confront them at the source. The task before us now is to (a) reduce the severity of the danger Jews face today, (b) prevent the further consequences still taking shape, and (c) prevent our history from being permanently overwritten and forever distorted in the digital record.We must begin to act like a community that has decided to win this information war by fighting where it is actually being fought: the architecture, algorithms, and archives.

Winning requires setting aside politics and competition, honestly evaluating our performance to date, and committing the resources necessary to win. We must immediately elevate the online threat to a top-priority security risk status, assigning to it the same urgency and attention we place on our physical safety.

Our efforts toward winning the information war will be enhanced through five strategic shifts, five adjustments in message, and the introduction of a community-wide capability to conduct a coordinated responses toward calculated digital objectives.

Improving Our Strategy

1. We must stop fighting a war we cannot win and start fighting the one we can. Antisemitism, repackaged for this generation as anti-Zionism, will not be argued or shamed out of existence. Currently, the bulk of our efforts focus on refuting claims rather than putting forth our case. Chasing the eradication of Jew-hatred will only exhaust us, and will inevitably, fail. We need to shift resources and adjust our tactics to advance our narrative, and present it in ways that exploit the distribution and promotion mechanisms embedded in online algorithms and AI training models.
2. We need to shift sufficient focus and resources to the actual war theater. Communal resources are still overwhelmingly directed at the consequences of online incitement – the assaults, the demonstrations, the biased resolutions, and the unfavorable headlines. We need to coordinate an overwhelming response in the ecosystem where the hostile narratives reach the masses. Treating the consequences will always put us a step behind our adversaries, who know how to exploit an uncontested battleground.
3. We need to train our young people before they encounter the algorithmic universe. Our children need to be taught how algorithms work and how to safely navigate the online ecosystem. They need to know how to engage the feeds, gaming chats, and short-form videos that shape their worldviews. If our efforts begin only once the child arrives on a hostile university campus, we will be contesting ground that has already been lost.
4. We need to be careful not to mistaken visibility for effectiveness, celebrating impressions and removed posts while Jews alter their behavior out of fear. A strategy that produces record engagement and record fear in the same year is not a strategy that is working.
5. As suggested in the first two previous articles in this series, we need to stop fighting for headlines and start fighting for architecture. The future of this conflict will be decided by who feeds the algorithms and shapes the archives that power the digital ecosystem. It is a different kind of campaign than the one we have been conducting, measured in search results and training data rather than likes and shares.

Adjusting our Message

Fixing the strategy is not enough if the message riding on top of it remains unpersuasive. The community’s messaging carries six recurring faults worth naming plainly.

1. It conflates criticism of Israeli policy, anti-Zionism, antisemitic rhetoric, and outright threats into a single undifferentiated charge, which weakens the charge when it is accurate.
2. It optimizes for applause from the already-convinced rather than movement among the genuinely undecided, (who are rarely won over by being made to feel foolish).
3. It communicates on the timeline of an official investigation inside an information environment that moves in minutes.
4. It leans on elite institutional statements while hostile forces speak in the native language of each platform they occupy.
5. It reaches for the Holocaust as a rhetorical reflex, overlooking a century of Arab violence against Jews in the land of Israel, from the 1929 Hebron massacre to October 7, 2023.

Building a Winning War Effort

None of these strategic and tactical changes will happen by themselves, and they will not happen without coordination among the hundreds of well-meaning organizations and influencers  now fighting in the digital ecosystem, each on its own. What has been missing is connective tissue: a coordinating body dedicated to the digital ecosystem that sets common verification standards, pools technical expertise, and synchronizes the output of our entire communal network toward the same targets at the same time. Winning does not require outshouting or outspending our adversaries so much as outlasting them by building a digital record so accurate, so well-sourced, and so consistently maintained that when the machines go looking for the truth, they find us.

A coalition of Jewish groups can deliver on seven essential action items.

1. Education – Raising digital and AI literacy across the entire community so that individuals (and organizations) learn when and how to react to digital content in ways that thwart, rather than reinforce, the algorithmic manipulations intended by our adversaries.
2. Security – Using AI-assisted verification to catch deepfakes, spoofed alerts, and impersonation before institutions act on or issue false instructions during an emergency, and to detect fundraising fraud.
3. Mobilization – Building the community’s capacity for rapid, coordinated engagement with specific content, so that it can be effectively mobilized to disrupt opposing campaigns.
4. Counterattack – Launching and sustaining a genuine digital counteroffensive, deploying variants of our adversaries’ own tactics alongside innovative new ones, in order to recover ground lost during the attention-capture, perceived-consensus, and institutional-narrative phases of the conflict. This is to be implemented within the bounds of truth, because our credibility is the one asset our adversaries cannot copy.
5. Training – Training organizations and individuals already producing digital content to create material that performs effectively within large language model training and retrieval processes.
6. Feeding the Archives – Producing digital content engineered to maximize algorithmic distribution and to serve as durable archival material for AI training.

These six functions map directly onto the four-phase framework set out in my previous article “Understanding the Information War.” Education and Security address the community’s exposure during Phase One (Establishing the Unavoidable Narrative), as well as the operational-security risks that AI introduces in Phase Three (Leveraging Perceived Consensus to Acquire Institutional Authority). Mobilization and Counterattack contest Phases One and Two (Translating Visibility into Perceived Consensus) directly, denying adversaries the early attention and manufactured consensus on which everything downstream depends. Training and Feeding the Archives are aimed squarely at Phases Three and Four (Transforming Institutional Authority into Permanent Digital Memory), the institutional and archival battlegrounds where the war will ultimately be won or lost.

There are dozens of Jewish organizations and hundreds of individual influencers bravely fighting the digital war daily. Their efforts are admirable and form a strong foundation, but to win we must come together as we have in the past when confronted with seemingly overwhelming opposition (such as the Soviet Jewry movement and Pro-Israel advocacy). The difficult circumstances we face today are merely a preface to the burden future generations will bear if we do not do everything we can today to influence the digital record of tomorrow.