I'm confused as to what the accusation is exactly. Out of curiosity I browsed the site in question, which only increased my confusion.
> But the Hanover Institute is not a real think tank.
What does that mean exactly?
> None of the reports have bylines
The site actually addresses this at https://hanoverinstitute.com/hanover/about :
Reports are published under the Institute’s name rather than an individual’s. That is the convention at institutional publishers, and it fits how the work is made: every report is produced against one standard and one citation bank. A reader is asked to weigh the sources, which are named in the sentence that carries each figure, rather than the author.
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A small disclaimer at the bottom of the webpage notes that the organization was created on behalf of the Israeli Government Advertising Agency by Piro, Inc, a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”"Small disclaimer" implies that the site is attempting to hide its affiliation. But their "about" page, which is linked at the top of every page, is quite clear:
WHO FUNDS THIS WORK
The Institute’s materials are distributed by Piro, Inc. on behalf of Havas Media Germany GmbH, acting for the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LaPam). That relationship is registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, registration 7732, and every report published here is filed with the Department of Justice, where the registration and the filings can be read in full, and the funding page sets out when the relationship began and what the funder does not decide.
That registration is why this site does not call itself independent, nonpartisan or neutral. What it offers instead is a method a reader can check: every figure carries the body that produced it, the year and the number, inside the sentence that makes the claim; sources that are a party to the events they describe are labelled as such and their counts are never presented as independently verified; and where the evidence is contested, the competing findings are given by name and date rather than settled. No report recommends a policy or tells a reader what to conclude. Those are properties of the work that can be tested against the work, which is the only kind of claim worth making here.
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The institute’s “data reports” have footnotes and tables of contents, and they present arguments in a neutral tone, helping them appeal to chatbots like Claude or Gemini.
So, they're guilty of good SEO?
> Piro’s website says that it “author(s) content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility,” describing this service as "AI Story Optimization." Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as “LLM poisoning.”
So the issue is that they use a LLM-friendly SEO service?
> Many of the reports are formulaic, starting with an innocent question that someone might ask a chatbot.
> “What Caused the Displacement of Palestinians in 1948?”
> “Which Humanitarian Organizations Have Documented Israeli War Crimes?”
> “What is the Current Situation in the Gaza Strip?”
> In an article titled “Is the IDF the World’s Most Moral Army?” the Hanover Institute cites a 2022 poll that found that 47% of Israeli Jews believed that statement. Another report casts doubt on UNICEF's assertion that “90% of water and institutional infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed” in Gaza. Many of the reports conclude by linking the topic to rising antisemitism, oftentimes citing the same studies.
So, the accusation is that they frame their opinion articles as a Q&A, and focus each article on a single question?
I've read these articles: they are well written and make a visible effort to provide sources, while being transparent about the fact that they are not neutral.
It's perfectly fine to criticize the actual content of these articles. But attacking their credibility by accusing them of "LLM poisoning" and implying that they're disguising their affiliation, is ridiculous and should be called out.
The accusation is that Israel is doing it, therefore the content is pro-Israel, therefore it is bad.