Golden Owl reports Iran-linked accounts posing as Israelis — Jerusalem Post
In Israel, the OSINT platform Golden Owl said it had uncovered a network of social media accounts that posed as citizens of the country and spread messages about the upcoming elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews. The Jerusalem Post reported on the investigation's findings.
The study was conducted from August 22 to September 22. Analysts reviewed 21,533 posts and flagged 1,516 of them as anomalous, including due to election disinformation, signs of foreign influence, or atypical account behavior. Voting in Israel is set to begin on October 27.
Claims about postponing the vote
According to Golden Owl, several accounts spread claims even before voting began that the election results would allegedly be stolen. Other accounts located outside Israel published false reports in Arabic, Russian, and English about the elections being postponed or halted because of foreign interference. These posts also claimed that taxes and mortgage payments had allegedly been frozen.
At the first stage of the study, 237 accounts were identified as suspicious, with 57 of them identified as part of a foreign influence campaign. Researchers also recorded offers on the darknet to sell Telegram accounts registered to Israeli numbers, as well as databases that allegedly contained information about Israeli voters and social media users.
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Personas posing as Israelis
Golden Owl analyzed 119,717 accounts and 294,980 connections between them. According to the platform's findings, coordinated personas joined discussions among real voters while presenting themselves as Israeli women, reservists, secular voters, or religious activists.
In particular, the @YaaraShalev account presented itself as the page of an Israeli Jewish woman, but, according to researchers, used borrowed and AI-generated images. Golden Owl called this profile the network's content-distribution hub. Another profile, @miriamkozak, which has nearly 19,000 followers, was identified by researchers as a hub for audience engagement.
Four accounts that posted in Hebrew about the elections and posed as Israeli were marked by X's transparency panel as using an Android app from Iran. One of them, @mardeankabooti, posted only in Persian about Iranian politics until April 2026, then changed its name in August and began running the page in Hebrew.
Golden Owl estimated that in the month before publication, the network's content was displayed about one million times. Researchers counted 9,112 interactions during that period and about 27,475 over the entire period of analysis. They estimated the number of accounts that interacted with the network at between 4,100 and 12,400. Of the 362 identified accounts, 76% were located in Israel.
