Days before the Knesset elections, Israel is on alert for possible cyberattacks or influence campaigns through its foreign rivals, adding Iran, aiming to sow new tensions among its bitterly divided population.
Tuesday’s election day is a “desirable target for influence campaigns,” Communications Minister Yoaz Hendel said ahead of Israel holding its fifth vote in less than four years as an unprecedented political stalemate continues.
The ministry and the National Directorate of Cyber Security will fight direct attacks on voting infrastructure, adding hacking efforts targeting the servers and websites of the Central Election Commission.
But those considerations are secondary, in part because Israelis vote through paper ballots. More serious are online campaigns aimed at undermining acceptance as truth in Israel’s democratic process, officials and experts said.
Election Commission Chairman Yitzhak Amit warned of efforts to “delegitimize the results,” “thereby damaging democracy. . . causing divisions and suspicion. “
Ofir Barel, a researcher at Tel Aviv University, said there is evidence of Iranian efforts “to try to influence Israeli society by spreading lies with political content. “
“We see in many cases false Iranian narratives that can overlook and spread departmental messages and incitement, or spread lies to damage the symbol of a confident politician,” said Barel, of the university’s science, generation and generation workshop. Safety.
He noted that Israel is more vulnerable to such attacks given its entrenched political divisions, with the electorate having inconclusive effects in 4 consecutive elections and much of the country divided between supporters of warmongering former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his opponents.
“The goal is to harm any specific politician to inspire polarization and chaos in Israeli politics, which is already confusing due to political stalemate,” Barel told AFP.
The Israel Internet Association, which advocates for the opening and use of online space, wrote a letter last month to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, warning of the “lack of sufficient preparation of popular social networks ahead of Israel’s elections. “
The letter highlighted Meta’s more physically powerful efforts to ensure electoral integrity in other countries with volatile and violent political climates, such as the United States, Brazil, Kenya, the Philippines, Ethiopia and India.
But the organization said it had “research-based doubts” about the application of Meta’s network criteria in Israel, raising the lack of Hebrew-language surveillance capability as an imaginable cause.
Civil society teams have also stepped up efforts opposing incendiary political content online, adding Fake Reporter, which revealed a hundred Facebook profiles targeting Netanyahu supporters, as well as broader efforts to incite hatred.
Before the vote, Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) conducted a simulation of imaginable cyberthreats.
INSS Director Tamir Heyman agreed that the threat to the voting and counting processes “is not high”, but warned that Israel is “open and susceptible to foreign influences” aimed at dividing society.
“It is time for Israel to have an official framework with the duty and authority of Israeli democracy in the face of the influence of foreign content,” he said.
Barel said there may be a silver lining to Israel’s inconclusive election cycle: with 4 votes taking place since 2019, other people have been practicing getting rid of fake content online meant to stoke tensions.
“There’s more awareness, other people don’t do everything that’s published,” he said.
But, he added, “after so many votes in such a short time, other people are tired of elections and politics, they don’t care so much. “
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