President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally on June 28, 2024, alongside an excerpt from Starboard’s Oct. 28 FARA filing. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images; document: U.S. Department of Justice)
A firm that compiles and markets lists of conservative Americans registered last week as a foreign agent for Israel, disclosing a $500,000 contract for a persuasion campaign inside the United States.
Starboard, an Arlington, Virginia, digital marketing firm registered under the legal name Olympic Media LLC, signed the agreement on Oct. 13 with Tel Aviv-based influencer marketing firm LDRS Group LLC, which is acting on behalf of the State of Israel, according to a Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filing submitted Oct. 28.
The contract calls for a 120-day “multichannel persuasion pilot,” beginning with audience construction and baseline assessment, followed by continuous content distribution, polling, and “sentiment analysis” to measure its effectiveness. The deliverables include a “Cost-Per-Converted-Voice”—an apparent analysis of how much it costs to change someone’s views on Israel.
Starboard operates multiple political content websites and popular social media channels, like PolitiBrawl on Substack and YouTube. It markets access to a database it says includes more than 25 million verified conservatives. The company’s website says it acquired Parler’s user base in 2023, before selling the platform in December 2024.
The company’s political customers include President Trump’s joint fundraising committee. The Trump National Committee JFC reported paying Olympic Media $368,205 in fundraising fees through 397 payments from January 2025 through September 2026, according to Federal Election Commission records.
The FARA registration comes as Republican sympathy for Israel is on the decline, particularly among young people. An Economist/YouGov poll conducted in late September found that 56% of Republicans sympathized more with Israelis than Palestinians, down from 73% shortly after the October 2023 Hamas attacks. A Pew Research Center survey in May found that only 28% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents under 35 viewed the Israeli government favorably.
Starboard’s founder and CEO, Ryan Patrick Coyne, previously served as chief financial officer of Republican digital firms IMGE and Media Group of America, according to his biography. The Daily Mail reported in August that Lynne Patton, a deputy assistant to the president, was living in Coyne’s Virginia penthouse and regularly bringing him to White House and Mar-a-Lago events.
LDRS has previously hired U.S. firms to manage influencers on Israel’s behalf. A February 2024 agreement filed with the Justice Department under FARA shows that it retained Davis Media NY to manage contracted content creators. Davis Media’s CEO, Yoav Davis, founded the prominent Instagram account Jews of NY, according to a report by the Quincy Institute. The new Starboard contract, however, expressly excludes paid influencer marketing.
Starboard’s publishing operation has been covering the Michigan Senate race heavily. American Wire, one of Starboard’s three “news publications,” has published at least 10 articles about Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed since the Oct. 13 contract signing, four of them on Oct. 31. The site’s own copy refers to him as “the Islamist Senate hopeful” and “the Islamist.” An Oct. 31 article on his campaign’s dispute with Rep. Haley Stevens described Democrats who protested the party’s 2024 ticket over Israel as “terrorist sympathizers.”
BizPac Review, another Starboard site, ran at least two of the same articles under identical headlines, along with a Nov. 1 article on Stevens endorsing Rogers. PolitiBrawl, which Starboard’s website describes as “the world’s largest SubStack,” posted three items about El-Sayed in the same period. These included an Oct. 28 post on a Trump rally in Michigan where the president played video of El-Sayed campaigning with streamer Hasan Piker and called it “most disgraceful of all.”
While these outlets may not be household names, they reach large audiences. BizPac Review’s advertising page claims more than 4 million unique monthly visitors, more than 2 million Facebook fans and almost 240,000 email subscribers. Its X account has 54,500 followers. PolitiBrawl’s YouTube channel has 221,000 subscribers and more than 129 million total views. BizPac Review says it sells sponsored emails and “petition campaigns” that let advertisers “convert BizPac Review readers” into email signups.
Starboard joins a growing roster of U.S. firms registered under FARA to work for Israel since the war in Gaza began. Much of the newer work is routed through Havas Media Germany, an arm of the French advertising conglomerate. Firms paid by Havas include Brad Parscale’s Clock Tower X, Stagwell’s Targeted Communications Global, Bridges Partners, and Piro. The contracts pay for pro-Israel social media content and paid ads, influencer campaigns, outreach to evangelical churches, and efforts to shape how AI chatbots answer questions about Israel.
The Quincy Institute estimates that since 2023, Israel has spent more than $100 million on influence activities within the U.S. under FARA, and that this year Israel is expected to be the single largest FARA-spending country.
