Iran Press/ Middle East: “The network operates through manipulations, slander, lies and spreading rumors,” the watchdog group, the Big Bots Project, an independent organization report said. On its busiest days, the network sends out thousands of tweets a day.
The network’s activity has intensified almost five fold since the election was called in December, the watchdog group, the Big Bots Project, an independent organization report said.
Netanyahu, who is facing an indictment on corruption charges, is in a tight race for what he hopes will be his fourth consecutive term. He is facing a strong challenge from Benny Gantz, a retired army chief, in the April 9 election, the New York Times reported.
Benny Gantz at a campaign rally in Tel Aviv
According to the report, 154 of the accounts in the network use fake names and another 400 accounts are suspected of being fake. The accounts appear to be operated by people, not bots, making them much harder to detect, the report says.
Their posts, all in Hebrew, have had over 2.5 million hits, the report’s authors estimate, in a society with 8.7 million citizens.
One of the accounts is under the name “Moshe,” tweeted only 16 times during the first three months of 2018. By contrast, during the first three months of this year, with the election campaign underway, he tweeted 2,856 times.
As Gantz became Netanyahu’s chief rival, the network focused more on him. The network’s activity has often spiked at times of key political events.
The evening before the attorney general announced his decision to indict Netanyahu, the network circulated a Facebook post by an American woman saying that Mr. Gantz had sexually harassed her when they were in high school.
The network has also attacked the attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, echoing Netanyahu’s assertion that by seeking to indict the prime minister the attorney general had “surrendered to the media and the left.”
The fake social media network’s messages have been redistributed by Yair Netanyahu (R) shown here with his father (L)
The network’s messages have been redistributed by prominent figures in the Likud campaign team. Yair Netanyahu, an unofficial adviser to his father’s campaign, has retweeted the network’s members 154 times, the report said. Similarly, the network “liked” and replied to his messages 1,481 times, and shared his messages 429 times.
Some of the tweets that include curse words and anti-Arab slurs are written using numbers that look like letters in the Hebrew alphabet, apparently so that a Twitter audit would not identify them as inappropriate and shut down the account. 105/205
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