On the Uyghur Genocide, we've seen aerial photography of the camps, images inside the camps, and survivors have testified before the UN on horrific accounts of abuse. Some of the most heinous stories I've ever read have come from that event, published by widely reputable outlets. Hard disagree that it's a government psyop.
A lot of the photographs and testimony is from a single source and is very biased. Human rights abuses are massively overstated by the west in an attempt to demonize China.
The associated press reported the camps closing nearly 5 years ago.
The entire conversation around the Uyghur "Genocide" has never been serious. The claim of genocide came from the estimated rate of population growth reducing(to a still positive rate) and the actual report, written by a high up member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation specifically used the phrase "Cultural Genocide".
Additionally, the region was a focus in the early 2000s during the War on Terror, when China asked to include the extremist groups in terror watch lists. The US agreed and they were included up until a couple years prior to the events in Xinjiang.
These were essentially re-education camps focused on radicalized groups. If anything, it's a more productive path than similar efforts, ie the ex-ISIS camps in Syria.
Those never seem to be mentioned in tandem. They're supported nominally by western countries, where ex-isis members and families are kept indefinitely. Thousands of stateless prisoners, including women with children are kept there. When the boys reach the age of 14(iirc), they're put in the actual prisons with the men. Those camps essentially concentrate the extremism for the eventuality of the camps' closure. No attempts were made for deradicalization.
We can also trace the endless deluge of articles with their citations and see almost every single one ends up at a thinktank laundering the Zenz report.
There is an actual genocide in Palestine right now where we watch in HD as missiles are leveling apartment blocks and ripping apart the families of doctors while they tend to the wounded.
There is also a war in Ukraine where we can watch the destruction of vast swaths of land and people in a WWI esque meat grinder.
What did we have for Xinjiang besides a whole lot of "trust-me"s from known anti-communism orgs? A few interviews? a couple pictures of prisoners?
If there were satellite photos of extensive camps, why wouldn't we be shown?
We got to see one or two possible camps, but they were disassembled.
People can travel in Xinjiang. I've seen the increased security on display in those videos, but it was primarily local police keeping tabs on the tourist to avoid some international incident.
When something real happens, you see many different sources reporting on it. People share it on social media, multiple agencies report first hand.
When the state department is trying to influence discussion, it's all think tanks.
That's a very incorrect reading of what I was trying to say.
I was saying if it was more than a state department propaganda operation, we'd see a lot more coming out. The reporting is starkly different from even reports coming out of Myanmar with the ethnic violence against the Rohingya(which barely gets any attention as-is).
Thank you for educating me brother - I never knew about the relationship between the GWOT and events in Xinjiang. The parallel between ex-ISIS camps in Syria is also very intriguing.
> Much of the generated content [from Russia] was to promote a self-described “expert community” called the International Burke Institute (IBI). The IBI brand was associated with a website which was registered in February 2025. This site claimed that the Institute was based in Israel.
This is the Russians using Israel as a cover. Not what the article linked is about.
This is not a related source at all, the article and discussion you linked is about a cluster of ChatGPT accounts originating in Russia. The discussion of this thread is about a US thinktank set up and funded by Israel to game AI for propaganda. This is getting meta - are you trying to game the discussion about this AI gaming thinktank?
I have to say that is almost an excellent point - think tanks are ultimately propaganda outfits, so it is hard to have a "fake" think tank which is merely that.
But in this case the "fake" label means that the think tank itself doesn't actually exist. The article expands on the topic with "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".
So if they hired some people to set up the HIPP and posted the same material it'd be a real think tank, but because the institute doesn't seem to exist at all it is a fake think tank. That isn't a comment on the writing produced.
I think it's a misunderstanding of what is alleged here. It's not alleged that the website produces propaganda. It's alleged that the website is fake, designed to seem like a legitimate source of information where info about it is just not available, in order to get AI to scoop up what it writes and treat it like a legitimate source of information vs how it would treat a real think tank which has a point of view that's documented and known in the world
A real think tank with real authors and disclosed funding sources could have something one can learn about it and its political leanings. A fake one can seem impartial due to little info existing about it (since it's fake).
That does kind of make it sound like think tanks are normally either straightforward or fundamentally honest about their agendas, which they pretty much never are. Even the ones that register and have DBAs fund reports that end up in scientific journals and publish articles through chains of obfuscatory intermediaries.
Really only possible in broken-futureland, to have a company whose sole purpose is to get paid to have an opinion.
Their purpose is to oppose/defend and research an opinion.
IMO this is a good thing. How else would society organize resources to investigate political opinions? It's certainly a very partisan job and doesn't fit well into nonpartisan organizations.
This one doesn’t have real staff or a real address. It’s an attempt to benefit from “intellectual” engagement with an issue, and having a corpus of work in support of a view, without doing the work or spending the time.
Plenty of people support Israel’s worldview. They are just choosing not to hire and pay them in this instance. That’s what makes it fake.
> A pro-Israel messaging website badged with the name of a thinktank that does not exist
> 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.
In the article, if you'd like to read it, it's quite informative about how AI poisoning or AI SEO will go forward in the coming years, imo
The Guardian article states that it doesn't exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no listed physical address, no named staff and no bylines on any reports. Their terms of use reference the laws of "the state in which the Institute is established" which isn't named.
It seems very impressive when you open it. That appears to be the point: the Israeli government's position presented as neutral, academic policy research purpose built for search LLMs to scrape and serve up in an AI overview as fact.
> It seems very impressive when you open it. That appears to be the point: the Israeli government's position presented as neutral, academic policy research purpose built for search LLMs to scrape and serve up in an AI overview as fact.
Given how much gaming of LLMs is undoubtedly already occurring it's more surprising how transparent and limited this is really.
The $10 million in funding is also seemingly a drop in the bucket to the billions anti-Israel and pro-Islamist governments like Qatar appear to be spending to influence actual academics wholesale [1,2]. No need to setup fake think tanks when you can just pay for Muslim Brotherhood to spread into western academia [3] (as far as pro-Israeli think tanks go at least ISGAP has actual meetings of scholars).
Yeah but this is especially interesting because it’s Israel doing it and Israel bad. Just don’t look at the thousands of other think tanks, universities, politicians and their funding that comes from other sources.
I'm no expert, but I'm guessing it's the fact that there's no actual thinking going on and it's AI generated slop designed to manipulate LLMs and subsequently the populace.
Just in case you were as confused as I was... There appear to be two completely different fake think tanks, reported almost simultaneously.
- International Burke Institute (IBI), Claims to be Israeli think tank, Funded by Russia. This one is ChatGPT generated promotion + fake institutional credibility.
- Hanover Institute for Public Policy, Claims to be US think tank, Israeli government funded. This one is deliberately publishing material optimized to influence/cite in LLM answers.
47 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 62.4 ms ] threadThe entire conversation around the Uyghur "Genocide" has never been serious. The claim of genocide came from the estimated rate of population growth reducing(to a still positive rate) and the actual report, written by a high up member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation specifically used the phrase "Cultural Genocide".
Additionally, the region was a focus in the early 2000s during the War on Terror, when China asked to include the extremist groups in terror watch lists. The US agreed and they were included up until a couple years prior to the events in Xinjiang.
These were essentially re-education camps focused on radicalized groups. If anything, it's a more productive path than similar efforts, ie the ex-ISIS camps in Syria.
Those never seem to be mentioned in tandem. They're supported nominally by western countries, where ex-isis members and families are kept indefinitely. Thousands of stateless prisoners, including women with children are kept there. When the boys reach the age of 14(iirc), they're put in the actual prisons with the men. Those camps essentially concentrate the extremism for the eventuality of the camps' closure. No attempts were made for deradicalization.
We can also trace the endless deluge of articles with their citations and see almost every single one ends up at a thinktank laundering the Zenz report.
There is an actual genocide in Palestine right now where we watch in HD as missiles are leveling apartment blocks and ripping apart the families of doctors while they tend to the wounded.
There is also a war in Ukraine where we can watch the destruction of vast swaths of land and people in a WWI esque meat grinder.
What did we have for Xinjiang besides a whole lot of "trust-me"s from known anti-communism orgs? A few interviews? a couple pictures of prisoners?
If there were satellite photos of extensive camps, why wouldn't we be shown?
We got to see one or two possible camps, but they were disassembled.
People can travel in Xinjiang. I've seen the increased security on display in those videos, but it was primarily local police keeping tabs on the tourist to avoid some international incident.
When something real happens, you see many different sources reporting on it. People share it on social media, multiple agencies report first hand.
When the state department is trying to influence discussion, it's all think tanks.
I was saying if it was more than a state department propaganda operation, we'd see a lot more coming out. The reporting is starkly different from even reports coming out of Myanmar with the ethnic violence against the Rohingya(which barely gets any attention as-is).
Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337392
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313477
This is the Russians using Israel as a cover. Not what the article linked is about.
Every thinktank has always been established to push some viewpoint.
But in this case the "fake" label means that the think tank itself doesn't actually exist. The article expands on the topic with "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".
So if they hired some people to set up the HIPP and posted the same material it'd be a real think tank, but because the institute doesn't seem to exist at all it is a fake think tank. That isn't a comment on the writing produced.
A real think tank with real authors and disclosed funding sources could have something one can learn about it and its political leanings. A fake one can seem impartial due to little info existing about it (since it's fake).
Really only possible in broken-futureland, to have a company whose sole purpose is to get paid to have an opinion.
IMO this is a good thing. How else would society organize resources to investigate political opinions? It's certainly a very partisan job and doesn't fit well into nonpartisan organizations.
Everyone knows think tanks are opinionated.
This one doesn’t have real staff or a real address. It’s an attempt to benefit from “intellectual” engagement with an issue, and having a corpus of work in support of a view, without doing the work or spending the time.
Plenty of people support Israel’s worldview. They are just choosing not to hire and pay them in this instance. That’s what makes it fake.
> 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.
In the article, if you'd like to read it, it's quite informative about how AI poisoning or AI SEO will go forward in the coming years, imo
It seems very impressive when you open it. That appears to be the point: the Israeli government's position presented as neutral, academic policy research purpose built for search LLMs to scrape and serve up in an AI overview as fact.
Given how much gaming of LLMs is undoubtedly already occurring it's more surprising how transparent and limited this is really.
The $10 million in funding is also seemingly a drop in the bucket to the billions anti-Israel and pro-Islamist governments like Qatar appear to be spending to influence actual academics wholesale [1,2]. No need to setup fake think tanks when you can just pay for Muslim Brotherhood to spread into western academia [3] (as far as pro-Israeli think tanks go at least ISGAP has actual meetings of scholars).
1: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/does-qatar-fund-antisemitism-at-... 2: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5711359/us-colleges-5-b... 3: https://isgap.org/follow-the-money/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49449449
PS. Defund Israel
"Well, just talking about this though could contribute to antisemitism."
Are there any bullshit detector LLM benchmarks?
- International Burke Institute (IBI), Claims to be Israeli think tank, Funded by Russia. This one is ChatGPT generated promotion + fake institutional credibility.
- Hanover Institute for Public Policy, Claims to be US think tank, Israeli government funded. This one is deliberately publishing material optimized to influence/cite in LLM answers.
> This one is deliberately publishing material optimized to influence/cite in LLM answers.
Isn't that just good SEO?
I might do the math and come back. I’m certain Israel is wildly over presented in attention on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337392
“Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism?” “Did Israel Expel Palestinians From Their Land?” “Is Israel Carrying Out a Genocide in Gaza?”
no need to even read them, if you have to pose those questions and pollute their answers the intention is pretty clear.