Are you a prominent African American lawmaker on Capitol Hill? Are your social media posts met with vaguely robotic exhortations to support the Israeli military?

If so, you might’ve been the target of a cheap, embarrassingly shoddy influence campaign paid for by the Israeli government. You can call The White House and complain, but it won’t likely do any good.

According to The New York Times, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs — which, as its name suggests, attempts to consociate Jews living abroad with the state — enlisted the help of Stoic, a for-profit Tel Aviv firm that specializes in political marketing for a hapless, ineffectual effort to sway public opinion around the war in Gaza.

This is the same campaign that Meta and OpenAI outed late last month. “The people behind [it] used our models to generate articles and comments that were then posted across multiple platforms, notably Instagram, Facebook, X and websites associated with this operation,” OpenAI said.

After being tipped off by DFRLab, Meta shut down Stoic’s operation on its platforms, including 510 Facebook accounts and dozens on Instagram. The campaign was initially flagged in March by FakeReporter, which said Israel also stood up a trio of fake news websites in support of the state-sponsored effort, which it called “reckless and extremely irresponsible.”

For its trouble, Stoic got a cease and desist letter from Meta, which didn’t link the fake accounts to the Israeli government. But the Times did. As Sheera Frenkel noted, writing from Tel Aviv, this is “the first documented case of the Israeli government’s organizing a campaign to influence the US government.”

The Times reviewed documents and messages related to the operation and confirmed the government’s involvement with four Israeli officials. Related social media accounts “posed as real Americans,” including students, Frenkel wrote, noting that they appeared to focus disproportionately (“particularly”) on black Democratic lawmakers including Hakeem Jeffries, Raphael Warnock and Ritchie Torres, who’s avowedly pro-Israel.

OpenAI called the operation “Zero Zeno” a hat tip to the stoics and an amusing allusion to “the low levels of engagement the network attracted,” as OpenAI put it, mocking the effort.

For its money, Israel managed to score just two out of six on a scale designed to measure the impact of influence operations. Meta’s tally of the group’s followers appeared to validate OpenAI’s assessment that the campaign was an abject failure.

In Frenkel’s account, Israeli startups were peppered with emails and WhatsApp messages in October touting an opportunity to become “digital soldiers” for the state. At least some of those messages came directly from Israeli government officials. Meetings were then convened and attended by “members of several government ministries.” Shortly thereafter, the government hired Stoic for $2 million, a paltry sum if I may say so.

Frenkel described the charade as “sloppy,” noting that in some cases, accounts ostensibly belonging to “middle-aged Jewish women” inexplicably used “profile photos of Black men.” (“That’s my husband, ok?!”)

What can you say? You get what you pay for, Israel. $2 million just doesn’t go very far these days. Maybe Mossad should run it next time. Also, this is where your tax dollars are going, America: To a state that engages in quasi-espionage against you.

Naturally, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs denied any involvement or connection with the campaign, and said it had no ties to Stoic, which didn’t respond to the Times‘s requests for comment.

As of Wednesday morning in the US, the campaign was still active on Elon Musk’s X, according to the Times.