It seems everyone is missing the forest for the trees by focusing on political motives, because the system is working exactly as designed. An ad platform is an auction-based machine for changing human behavior at scale, and a state actor is just the ultimate power user. They have a clear objective, an unlimited budget, and are willing to pay a premium for high-value keywords. To the ad exchange, a bid from the Israeli government to show an anti-UN ad is indistinguishable from a bid from Nike to show a shoe ad; it's just a high CPM impression from a client with a good credit line. The entire infrastructure is optimized to find the highest bidder for a given set of eyeballs, not to make a moral judgment on the message. You don't need to control the newspaper anymore, you just need to outbid everyone else for the ad space next to the article.

It’s propaganda-as-a-service.