This is all fascinating:

Percepto International, which is owned by media consultant Lior Chorev and Royi Burstien (a retired lieutenant colonel from the Israeli army’s intelligence corps), is in large measure a continuation of Psy Group – the business Burstien used to run. Among other activities, Burstien’s previous business ran a sophisticated mass-deception system on social media and came to public attention mainly over an FBI investigation, after which it shut down.

Psy Group, its founder Joel Zamel and CEO Burstien were investigated by the U.S. bureau on suspicion of offering their services to Donald Trump’s campaign headquarters on his first run for the presidency in 2016. The suspicion was that a foreign player, and not Trump, had offered to pay for the services. The investigation did not result in indictments, but did lead to the demise of Psy Group – which had been facing financial difficulties even before the investigation.

A 2020 report from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on foreign involvement in the 2016 election contained quotes from internal company emails regarding negotiations between people from the firm and Trump’s people. It included remarks by a company employee, Arnon Epstein, regarding “intel on the Lady and her team” – a reference to Hillary Clinton. It noted that intelligence gathering regarding 10 targets associated with Clinton would cost about $250,000. In another email, an offer was made to deploy avatars (complex fake digital personae with a presence across social media platforms) in support of Trump’s election campaign.

Following the collapse of Psy Group, Burstien and Epstein established a new deception enterprise based less on technology and more on target-oriented influence operations. The organization, which was initially called Athiri, worked in collaboration with Chorev. In 2021, the team that was running it began operating under a new name: Percepto International. Burstien is Percepto’s CEO, Chorev is company chairman and Epstein acts as a senior salesperson. One of the new mudslinging enterprise’s biggest initial wins was against the ICRC.

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Burstien, the company CEO who coordinated Percepto’s presentations, revealed his company’s arsenal to us. It included creating defamatory articles; the use of the services of an antisemitic social media influencer whom the U.S. State Department has identified as a long arm of the Kremlin; the establishment of fake nonprofit organizations; and a “news agency” that was actually a covert propaganda tool.

To top it off, it boasted of having an investigative journalist in Paris who was actually an avatar run by company staffers in Ramat Gan.

In one of Burstien’s presentations, the Percepto CEO showed a screenshot of a report linking the ICRC to terrorist organizations in the Sahel region. The photo was pixilated to keep the details confidential, but it was not blurred that well.

“Our client had a real problem with a specific NGO that really was not really objective,” Burstien explained in English. “So the question is, how do you get this NGO out of the ball game? … First thing is [to] obtain intelligence. … We obtained really good intelligence. We understood that if we published this information in [the] local media, it [wouldn’t] resonate. We worked with tier-one French media. … The process took over a month for them to validate the information.

“Immediately after they published it … we took it and published it within our assets,” Burstien said, using a phrase he repeated several times during our conversations to describe the avatar network and outlets controlled by Percepto that were purportedly news websites.

“It went viral in the country, but also it was picked up by a lot of European media. This is a very well-known NGO,” he said.

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All fabulously interesting content.

Especially titillating is the fact that they will work with essentially anybody.

Antisemitic influencers, fake journalists: Inside an Israeli factory for online deception

For Israeli-owned Percepto International, slandering the International Red Cross and recruiting an antisemitic internet influencer are legitimate tactics ■ The company has run a fake investigative journalism site, rigged the reputation of a Netanyahu…

^{Gur Megiddo (Haaretz)}