A company acting on behalf of the Israeli government signed a contract last month with an American company that advertises its access to a database of more than 25 million “verified conservatives” to help Israel influence U.S. public opinion, according to newly disclosed federal documents.

Starboard LLC, headed by American media executive Ryan Coyne, signed an agreement with an Israeli influencer marketing firm acting “on behalf of the State of Israel,” according to the documents, which were recently disclosed in line with the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA.

The contract comes as the Israeli government contends with increasing hostility from sections of the Republican base over Israel’s role in drawing the U.S. into a wildly unpopular war in Iran. Starboard is an important partner for any effort to influence conservatives in the U.S. The company acquired the right-wing social media site Parler in 2023, and quickly sold it later that year. But even after the sale of Parler, Starboard kept “data used for email and text message marketing,” Coyne told WIRED in a March 2024 interview.

Starboard also owns or promotes several conservative news websites, including American Wire and BizPac Review. Its most popular website is PolitiBrawl, a publisher of political content that attracts substantial audiences on media platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Its Substack account lists more than 1.3 million subscribers.

The $500,000 contract, dated October 13 and filed with the Justice Department on October 28, outlines a 120-day campaign of public influence on behalf of Israel. The contract establishes a “persuasion pilot program that measures contact impact and sentiment analysis through regular polling,” followed by “continuous content deployment, optimization, and measurement” to assess user sentiment. The contract requires Starboard to produce a final report that assesses the cost of changing a user’s opinion, a metric referred to in the contract to as “Cost-Per-Converted-Voice.”

Starboard continues to advertise its access to the data of conservative social-media users through its prior ownership of the platform and a broader network of conservative media platforms.

On its website, Starboard states that its acquisition of Parler gives the company and its clients access to the platform’s politically engaged user base.

Starboard has previously performed fundraising work for President Donald Trump, and its website lists past work with Turning Point USA and conservative political figures like Matt Gaetz, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), and Vivek Ramaswamy. Starboard’s website also advertises services in strategic communications and government relations, boasting that it “provides unparalleled expertise in navigating U.S. policy, regulations, and global opportunities, particularly now under the Trump administration.”

Parler Games

Parler was founded during Trump’s first term as a self-styled free-speech alternative to mainstream social-media platforms, attracting a range of conservatives and far-right activists who accused platforms like Twitter and Facebook of censoring their views.

The platform became a focus of national controversy after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Among the rioters that day were Parler users, some of whom were arrested. The social-media company’s “unique business model and content moderation policies were likely a contributing factor in fomenting some of the violence” during the attack, according to research published by the public-policy think tank New America. Days later, Apple and Google removed Parler from their app stores, and Amazon suspended its web-hosting services over concerns about the platform’s failure to moderate its content.

In April 2023, Starboard, previously known as Olympic Media, purchased Parler for an undisclosed sum. At the time, Coyne was explicit about the value of owning access to Parler’s conservative user base, describing it as an opportunity to expand Starboard’s advertising and publishing businesses. He said his company looked forward to “integrating that audience across all of our existing platforms.”

Later that year, Starboard sold the platform to PDS Partners, whose owners included former Republican political operative Ryan Rhodes, who became Parler’s CEO, and Elise Pierotti, a former Parler marketing executive who returned as its chief marketing officer. The identities of other investors were not publicly disclosed. PDS Partners is structured as a limited liability company. Rhodes and Pierotti have described themselves as its partial owners, while declining to identify remaining investors, leaving Parler’s full ownership and financing structure unclear.

The Israeli government’s hiring of Starboard comes amid a major spending campaign to shore up American support for Israel among conservatives who have increasingly soured on the U.S. relationship with the country—particularly younger generations angered by the war in Iran and U.S. support for Israel. Israel’s 2026 budget allocated roughly $730 million to its global public-relations budget, more than four times what it spent the previous year.

Israel has increased its interventions in U.S. public opinion over the last year, according to Eli Clifton, cofounder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “This is in response to collapsing public support that extends all the way into conservative and evangelical communities that have long been seen as the electoral lynchpin for Israel’s political support within the U.S.,” Clifton, co-author of the book “Israel’s Lobby,” told Drop Site News.

“Retaining the support of conservatives and Republicans is vital if Israel will continue to maintain the status-quo levels of support it currently enjoys, despite the majority of Americans wanting greater distance between the U.S. government and Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” he added.

In a speech to evangelical Christian leaders in Florida in December 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the battle for public opinion in the United States as the “eighth front” in Israel’s wars. Ordinary Americans, “especially on the conservative wing of the United States,” must be a major focus of Israeli influence campaigns, he added.

Israel’s public-relations spending spree has targeted both political conservatives and younger evangelicals across the country, using online platforms, right-wing media outlets, Christian influencers, and even location-based ad campaigns targeting places of worship. In July, an Israeli Foreign Ministry official told TIME magazine that a central objective of the government’s influence campaigns in the U.S. was to prevent conservatives from turning against Israel. The official added that the country was looking for partners “who understood the landscape of the internet and MAGA culture.”

“Cost-Per-Converted-Voice”

The contract was signed by Coyne, and lists an executive of the Israeli firm working on the state’s behalf, Udi Mendelovits, chief financial officer of LDRS Group, or Leaders.

The FARA documents do not provide many details about the pilot program, but they indicate that Starboard is expected to identify target audiences and develop measurements of users’ political views. The aims of the contract include “Audience Development and Panel Construction,” “Content Production and Distribution,” and “Optimization and Analytics,” to be performed by Starboard over the course of the engagement.

According to the filing, Starboard is also required to measure how much it costs to change an individual’s views—what the contract calls a “Cost-Per-Converted-Voice” assessment.

The contracting intermediary, Leaders, has previously organized social-media campaigns on behalf of the Israeli government. In February 2024, the company contracted Davis Media NY to manage up to ten influencers producing pro-Israel content for social media. In December 2023, representatives of Leaders approached influencers in the U.S. and offered to pay them to promote content on Instagram, the Washington Post reported. FARA documents filed as recently as 2025 identified Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the government agency represented through Leaders.

Although the formal agreement in the new filing names Leaders as Starboard’s client, the document footnotes repeatedly identify the agreement as “Starboard x Havas Frankfurt,” an apparent reference to Havas Media Germany, the Frankfurt-based subsidiary of the French advertising giant Havas.

Havas has served as a major intermediary for Israeli government–funded communications campaigns in the United States, working on behalf of Israel’s Government Advertising Agency to hire American political consultants, advertising agencies, and public-relations firms. Among its contractors is Clock Tower X, a firm headed by Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale. In 2025, Clock Tower X agreed to a four-month contract with Havas for an initial $6 million.

That agreement called for the production of at least 100 original pieces of pro-Israel content for social media each month, with 80% targeting Gen Z audiences. The agreement also specified the integration of messaging into one of the country’s largest conservative Christian media companies, Salem Media Network, in addition to efforts to shape how information about Israel appears in search engines and in LLM responses.

Starboard explicitly advertises its ability to promote clients’ content through its YouTube audience and its online publications. Its marketing materials also advertise services for its clients including email marketing, text messaging, video advertising, and creative testing.

The contract signed with Leaders on behalf of the Israeli government does not specify what channels, if any, Starboard would use to promote pro-Israel messaging to conservative American social media users.

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