Fake accounts try to undermine the Israeli election

As if Israelis didn’t have enough to argue about, the Iranians, it seems, want their say too. With less than a week to go before Israel’s election, some of the people arguing most loudly about Benjamin Netanyahu, the war, and the country’s future, aren’t Israelis at all. Some don’t even exist. 

The Israeli newspaper Calcalist recently reported on an investigation by Spanish intelligence research company Golden Owl that uncovered hundreds of accounts on X masquerading as ordinary Israelis. They had Hebrew names, Israeli flags, and invented personal histories. They discussed politics, attacked politicians, and joined arguments that real Israelis were already having. 

Golden Owl assessed 445 of the accounts as linked to an Iranian influence operation, with high or medium-high confidence. Posts from the network attracted at least 4.7 million views between 11 August and 11 October. That’s a considerable audience, although views don’t tell us how many people believed what they read, let alone whether anyone changed their vote. 

I know this game. During my years working for RT, the Russian state-funded television network, whenever I was sent to South Africa, I was encouraged to look for stories that questioned whether the country’s new democracy was working – stories, for example, that focused on xenophobia, land reform, and the controversy over expropriation without compensation. When I was sent to Berlin or Paris, the brief was to focus on refugees arriving in large numbers and the damage they were doing to European societies. 

I came to understand that the point wasn’t necessarily to make people like Russia. That was always going to be a difficult sell. It was far easier to make Westerners, like you and me, question their governments. If viewers could be persuaded that their own countries were failing, Russia might not look quite so bad by comparison. 

I see something similar playing out in the suspected Iranian-linked accounts talking about Israeli elections. Whoever is behind them doesn’t need Israelis to support Iran, and that isn’t their goal. Making Israelis more suspicious of their leaders, their institutions, and one another may be, though. The accounts weren’t trying to introduce arguments Israelis had never heard before. They were discussing responsibility for 7 October, the conduct of the war, military service exemptions for the ultra-Orthodox, and Netanyahu’s leadership. These are subjects Israelis argue about passionately without any encouragement from Tehran. 

So what does it achieve? The idea is that the more often Israelis encounter these arguments, the more they may begin to believe that the country is even more divided than it already is. Anger feeds anger, distrust grows, and the sense that nobody can be believed becomes harder to shake. That, for whoever is behind these accounts, may be a more useful outcome than persuading anyone to vote for a particular party. 

One example from an earlier Golden Owl investigation involved an account calling itself Alon Strauss. It appeared to belong to an Israeli political commentator, complete with Hebrew posts criticising Netanyahu. Until April, however, the same account had been posting in Persian about Iranian politics. 

Golden Owl’s wider monitoring also picked up claims about electoral fraud and suggestions that the election might be postponed, although the researchers couldn’t attribute every such claim to the suspected Iranian-linked network. This takes the manipulation a step further. It’s no longer simply about encouraging Israelis to distrust one another. It’s about encouraging them to distrust the election itself. If people are convinced that the system is rigged, the result becomes suspect before a single vote has been counted. That could suit whoever is trying to undermine confidence in Israel’s institutions. 

But foreign interference is only part of the picture. Some of the attempts to manipulate Israel’s online political conversations appear to be coming from inside the country itself. Earlier this month, TikTok reported removing more than 45 000 videos in Israel for breaching its rules on election integrity, misinformation, and misleading content generated by artificial intelligence. Separately, it uncovered a coordinated network of 306 accounts it assessed as operating from Israel and attempting to amplify political messages. 

The removed videos and the covert networks were separate findings. But the Israeli-based network raises an uncomfortable question: how much of what appears to be spontaneous political debate is actually being organised within Israel? 

And even when the online activity is genuine, it’s not always what it seems. Israeli television’s Channel 12 recently analysed 368 TikTok videos from eight political accounts, with nearly 10 000 comments on some of the most popular posts. Much of the conversation had surprisingly little to do with policy. People were responding to jokes, personalities, and whatever caught their attention. 

Among the examples was a comment on a video involving former prime minister Naftali Bennett and a toasted sandwich. The commenter joked that Bennett’s failure to put sauce in his sandwich was enough to make her switch her vote to him. Almost 2 000 people liked the comment. I wouldn’t, however, assume those likes meant Bennett had won himself 2 000 votes. 

Here in South Africa, we’re watching an Israeli election in which many of us feel deeply invested. We speak to family and friends in Israel, follow the arguments, and receive a steady stream of videos, posts, and messages. Often, we’re forming opinions about what Israelis think without knowing who produced the material we’re watching. 

After years of reporting from conflict zones, I’ve become accustomed to asking who is making a claim, what evidence supports it, and what interest the source might have in telling the story. These questions matter just as much when the subject is an election instead of a war. Israel’s divisions are real. They don’t need to be invented by Iran, and they shouldn’t be dismissed simply because an Iranian-linked network has tried to exploit them. On Tuesday, Israelis will decide who governs them. The fake accounts won’t have a vote. But they’ve already been part of the argument. 

• Paula Slier is an international journalist, war correspondent, and speaker who has reported from conflict zones across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.