Published: 14 September 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
DID AN ISRAELI EXPATRIATE from Australia seek to smear a protest movement against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu through an incendiary Facebook post published from a fictitious account?
The Australian Federal Police confirmed to The Jewish Independent that it is aware that counterparts from Israel are investigating a local link to a bogus account named “Dana Ron”, which called for Netanyahu’s assassination in the hours after one of the frequent mass protests over Netanyahu’s corruption trial and his handling of the pandemic .
“Only force will bring down Netanyahu,’’ the message read. “Dictators are moved aside only with a bullet in the head.”
Facebook removed the account as a fake soon after the original post at the end of July. However, there has been no word about the progress of the Israeli investigation since an August 5 police announcement that the account was located overseas. Israel’s Channel 13 news reported the same day that Israel’s prosecutor would initiate a legal inquiry with authorities in Australia.
The incident grabbed headlines in Israel because, before it’s dubious bonafides were revealed by an anti-Netanyahu digital expert activist, the prime minister’s Facebook handle shared the post and announced plans to file a police complaint. Netanyahu alleged the post was an example of “terrible incitement” that the protests were fanning.
Others speculated that it might be part of a “false flag” attempt (committed with the intent of pinning blame on a second party) to implicate Netanyahu’s opponents. Until now, however, no one can say for sure.
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The Dana Ron account is just one example of the murky and incendiary political discourse on social media platforms and its impact on public opinion not just in Israel, but globally. According to Facebook, fake accounts account for 5 percent of its monthly active users. The company said that in the first half of 2020, it removed 3.2 billion fake accounts. Moreover, a significant portion of the bogus activity crosses international borders: last year the company removed 50 networks involved in foreign interference and “coordinated inauthentic activity”.
In Israel, there is little government regulation of discourse on social platforms, say social media experts. And, like the Dana Ron case, a large portion of political discourse actually originates outside of Israel.
“There are so many fake accounts, but few smoking guns. Dana Ron was a smoking gun,” said Anat Ben-David, a senior lecturer at Israel’s Open University, who focuses on social media and politics. “Facebook was quick to remove [the Dana Ron post], and the police were quick to announce its origin overseas. And yet, we don’t know who is behind the smoking gun.”
The mystery surrounding the account stretches back to just after midnight on July 29, hours after anti-Netanyahu demonstrators were attacked by masked right-wing vigilantes on the streets of Tel Aviv. That’s when the Dana Ron account published a post that appeared to call for Netanyahu’s assassination.
Israeli activist journalist Yossi Dorfman, who runs digital campaigns for private companies and political organisations, said the account immediately caught his attention as suspicious. Firstly, he said, there was no picture on the account. Another unusual sign was that the post was written with Hebrew vowel points - characters which are seldom used by Israelis except when quoting biblical Hebrew.
Dorfman then examined the account and found additional examples of unusual activity, including the posting of an anti-Netanyahu article that was outdated for months. Shortly after Dorfman published on Twitter a catalogue of the irregular posts by the account, Facebook confirmed that that the account was indeed a fake and removed it.
About one month after the police said the account belonged to a female Israeli expatriate living overseas, spokesmen for the Israeli Justice Ministry and Facebook Israel declined requests by The Jewish Independent to comment on whether there had been any progress in identifying who was behind the posts.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the relatively quick identification of the location of a fake account doesn’t indicate a swift apprehension of a suspect.
“It doesn’t mean you find someone in the next day, a week or the next two weeks,” he said.
There are so many fake accounts, but few smoking guns. Dana Ron was a smoking gun. And yet, we don’t know who is behind the smoking gun.
Later in August, Dorfman found three additional suspicious Facebook accounts which posted the same decades-old images of Netanyahu holding his hand as if he is giving a Nazi salute. The account also tagged activists within the movement. Facebook has since removed the accounts. Dorfman said he couldn’t say definitely who might be behind the account, but added they appear to be an attempt to make people think that the anti-government protesters are demonising the prime minister with incendiary posts.
“It’s someone who wants people to think that they are anti-Netanyahu and pro-demonstrations,’’ he said. I can't say who is behind the fake accounts. I can only show the evidence and assume who is gaining from it.”
In a Facebook account post thanking the police for the investigation, Netanyahu dismissed accusations that the fake account was part of an organised campaign of social media bots.
IT'S NOT THE FIRST TIME a fake account has stirred up Israeli politics. Two years ago, Itai Leshem, an Israeli lawyer and independent digital media activist, pressed Facebook for months to remove an account named “Adam Gold,” a pen name for a popular right-wing avatar that defended the prime minister against multiple allegations of bribery and fraud. At one point, the “Adam Gold” identity was reincarnated under the name of an Israeli woman from California.
Leshem alleged that Dana Ron is part of a similar phenomenon: social media accounts enlisted by Netanyahu outside of Israel - well removed from local law enforcement - to manipulate the discourse in Israel.
“Bibi wanted to create fake news about incitement to murder by left-wingers,” he claimed. Ben-David said that such a conclusion is just speculation, but added the inability to say definitively who is behind the account is in the interest of “agents of disinformation” on social networks.
Political organisations have hired local digital agencies and outsourced digital campaigns to foreign groups to try to spin social networks algorithm to their advantage, said Tehila Schwartz, a fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute who specialises in new media policy who described the lack of regulation in Israel as a “wild west” for social network activity.
“There are no rules and regulations on these issues, neither for election campaigns nor on a regular basis. Our privacy legislation is outdated, therefore bots can target people according to their psychological profiles. There aren’t any political propaganda rules that would force parties to be transparent about which accounts are created by them and constitute propaganda,’’ Schwartz said.
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“Political campaigns can do whatever they want. They can create a fake person and fake likes so public opinion will think something is more popular that it really is. It can spread fake news and affect popular discourse. We’ve seen it in municipal elections in Israel. I’m scared because they are getting more and more sophisticated in their tools.”
Incidents of misinformation, fake accounts, and “fake news” have been especially persistent in the US, where political discourse on social media platforms has been the target of state-sponsored campaigns to influence public opinion. The Russian government has been the subject of multiple investigations by US authorities.
Facebook came under criticism earlier this year for refusing to police the veracity of political advertisements. In the summer, hundreds of companies boycotted Facebook over its refusal to police right-wing hate speech and misinformation surrounding the Black Lives Matter protests.
Anat Ben-David says Facebook should reveal more information about discourse on its platform so the public can better understand.
“Behind the scenes, Facebook has so much information on manipulators. They can see organised accounts. They can detect activity that stems from the same email address that are paid by the same bank account. If one is interested in manipulation, this is the kind of data that we need to have publicly - who is truthful and who is not.’’
Some 50 percent (of comments on the PM's Facebook page) originates in the US, and 25 percent of the comments are posted from the rest of the world, including countries which have no relations with Israel.
After a two-year analysis of 5.3 million comments on Israeli politicians' Facebook pages, Ben-David found that commenters on the Prime Minister’s page are significantly different from the rest of the Israeli political universe. Three-quarters of the comments come from accounts outside of Israel. Some 50 percent originates in the US, and 25 percent of the comments are posted from the rest of the world, including countries which have no relations with Israel, like Indonesia, she said.
Could that activity represent thousands of fake “Dana Rons”? Ben David said no one can say for sure. However, she did say that Prime Minister Netanyahu is much more sophisticated in using new media than anyone else in Israel - from social media bots on his Facebook page that interact with supporters to an application which leveraged data from Israel’s election registry to target potential voters.
“We don’t know who funds the operation. The empire consists of hundreds of thousands of pages, groups, users and bots, and WhatsApp groups.”
Ben-David herself has appealed, in vain, to local authorities to act against accounts repeating incendiary messages against Israeli Supreme Court Justices. The lack of transparency about ocean of inauthentic accounts like Dana Ron will ultimately erode civic discourse in Israeli and other democracies, she said.
“There is declining trust, everyone suspects everyone else, and we can’t have a healthy conversation,’’ Ben David said. “I have nostalgia for how the internet was good for democracy when it was decentralised. What happened to that? When a few actors control what the whole world is saying is very dangerous, and this is where we are at.”
That means, for the foreseeable future, conversations on social platforms are likely to remain dogged by questions about what is authentic and what is a ruse meant to bend users' perceptions of reality.
“Maybe ‘Dana Ron’ is what Netanyahu and his ministers are saying: that someone is inciting in a horrible way. But maybe it’s a false flag,’’ said Dorfman. “It could be from Israel. It could be from abroad. It could be the collaboration of someone in Israel and someone abroad - someone who invited foreign network or company, or a state, or a state supported proxy. Everyone can look at the puzzle and decide.”
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Anti-Netanyahu activists say this false flag campaign is an attempt to kill their protest (Haaretz)
Activists say they have uncovered at least three suspicious accounts, and are investigating over a dozen more, which they charge are part of an operation to turn the public against the anti-Netanyahu protests
Photo: Anti-Netanyahu protesters outside the prime minister's private residence in Caesarea, September 5 (Rami Shllush)
