Kremlin’s cyber strategy: thousands of Russian troll tweets in Hebrew

Published: 23 August 2018

Last updated: 4 March 2024

DESPITE THE GLOBAL headlines about Russian meddling in foreign elections, Israeli experts have thus far expressed little concern that it could happen in their country. But the recent release by researchers at Clemenson University of three million Russian troll tweets created by Russia’s Internet Research Agency between 2012 and 2018 paints a different picture.

Reporters from Israel’s Channel 10 News found that tens of thousands of the tweets dealt with Israel and the region and some were written in Hebrew, indicating they were indeed targeting Israelis and people who care about Israel.

“We now know for a fact that Russia has been interfering on a massive scale in US, German and UK elections and referendums,” said Ilya Zaslavskiy, the expert on Russian covert ambitions, who is a member of the advisory board at the Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative.

“We know that they intervened in the Catalonia referendum as well as a referendum on Ukraine in Holland. They continue to interfere in the US midterms and they have been meddling in all sorts of local elections in Eastern Europe. and the post-Soviet space,” he said. “So why wouldn’t they interfere in Israeli elections when Israel is so important to their strategic interests?”

FULL STORY Is Putin’s Kremlin subverting Israeli democracy? A Russia expert thinks so (Times of Israel)

Photo: Vladimir Putin with Benjamin Netanyahu at the Kremlin in Moscow on July 11 (AFP/ Pool/Yuri Kadobnov)