Likud published more than 1,800 AI posts during Israel campaign — Deutsche Welle
In Israel, the Likud party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu published more than 1,800 posts with content created or altered using artificial intelligence during the election campaign as of mid-October. This accounts for about a quarter of the party’s analyzed social media materials, Deutsche Welle reports, citing the Ze Be AI research project of the Open University of Israel.
Israelis will vote in parliamentary elections on October 27. Ze Be AI researchers have been tracking politicians’ posts on Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok since late July. By mid-October, they had collected more than 44,000 publications and found that AI had been used in one way or another in more than 14% of the materials — including for images, music, subtitles, logos and deepfakes.
Videos and labeling rules
One such video was a 19-second AI-generated clip that Netanyahu posted on X in July. It shows prime ministerial candidate Gadi Eisenkot running toward a person resembling his son, but ultimately embracing Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Arab party Ra’am. The video was viewed more than one million times. Eisenkot’s son was killed in 2023 during Israel’s war with Hamas.
More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.
In July, Israel’s Central Elections Committee required all AI-generated or AI-altered content in election campaigning to be labeled. That same month, the committee’s chair ordered Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to remove an unlabeled AI video that the committee described as misleading.
Robocalls and bot networks
AI is also being used for direct contact with voters. Disinformation researcher Nitzan Yasur provided a recording of a four-minute automated call: a voice introducing itself as Danielle, an employee of an Israeli polling institute, asked questions about voting preferences. When Yasur asked whether the voice was human, it replied that there was no operator on the line, but did not disclose who had commissioned the poll.
Media monitoring company Scooper also said it had identified a network of inauthentic accounts promoting Netanyahu on social media. According to its data, more than a thousand new accounts appeared on X each day and immediately followed the prime minister’s page, while about 70% of accounts sharing his posts are based outside Israel and show signs of being bots. Israeli organization FakeReporter separately reported a bot campaign that it linked to the campaign of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir; his office denied this.
