Original to:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-israel-limited-online-deception-during-its-election
Earlier this year, Hanan Melcer, the chairman of Israel’s Central
Elections Committee and a veteran justice on the Supreme Court, summoned
representatives from major U.S. social-media and technology companies
for talks about the role he expected them to play in curbing online
deception during the country’s election, which took place on Tuesday.
Facebook and Google sent representatives to meet with Melcer in person.
Twitter executives, who weren’t in the country, arranged for a
conference call. “You say you’ve learned from 2016,” Melcer told them,
according to a government official who was present. “Prove it!”
When Melcer, two years ago, assumed his role overseeing the election, he
expected that covert influence campaigns by foreign adversaries, similar
to Russia’s alleged interference during the 2016 U.S. Presidential race,
could be his biggest challenge. But, as Melcer and his colleagues looked
more closely into the issues they could face, they realized that the
problem was broader than foreign interference. Russia’s campaign in the
United States demonstrated that fake personas on social media could
influence events. In Israel and elsewhere, political parties and their
allies realized that they could use similar techniques to spread
anonymous messages on the Internet and on social media to promote their
candidates and undermine their rivals.
The use of fake online personas has a long history in Israel. In the
mid-two-thousands, an Israeli company called Terrogence used them to
infiltrate suspected jihadi chat rooms. Later, Terrogence experimented
with covertly influencing the jihadis they targeted. More recently,
companies in Israel and elsewhere started using fake personas to spread
messages on behalf of political parties and their allies.
Laws governing Israeli election campaigns, which date back, in their
original form, to the late nineteen-fifties, bar political parties from
disseminating messages anonymously in print, on the radio, and on
television. But the laws were never updated to cover messages
disseminated online.
Around the world, countries have addressed social-media manipulation in
different ways and with varying degrees of urgency. U.S. lawmakers have
criticized Facebook, Twitter, and other major social-media companies for
allowing Russian misinformation to proliferate on their platforms. But
Congress has taken few steps to address the issue, wary of impinging on
free-speech protections.
An early proponent of modernizing Israel’s election laws was Tehilla
Shwartz Altshuler, a law professor and senior researcher with the
nonpartisan Israel Democracy Institute. In 2018, some of her
recommendations found their way into draft legislation, which called for
banning political parties from disseminating anonymous messages via the
Internet or social media. “I was very satisfied. It was full circle for
me,” Altshuler told me in a phone call last week. Then, in October,
shortly after the legislation began circulating, a legal adviser in the
Knesset told Altshuler that the legislation had been blocked by the
party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “It was stopped by Likud,”
Altshuler recalled. An official with the centrist Yesh Atid party, led
by Yair Lapid, a prominent former television journalist, confirmed the
role of Likud in blocking the legislation, which Lapid supported.
“Netanyahu put the brakes on it at the last moment,” a Yesh Atid
official told me. Likud officials did not respond to a request for
comment.
Lapid has been one of Netanyahu’s most formidable political challengers
and, in the run-up to Tuesday’s election, was a frequent target of
anonymous online attacks, which his aides attributed to rival political
parties. This past September, Lapid met with Israel’s President, Reuven
Rivlin, and urged him to use the influence of his office to convince all
of the country’s political parties to agree to a voluntary moratorium on
anonymous campaign messaging. One of the President’s aides told me that
Rivlin was already aware of the problem. Shortly after his meeting with
Lapid, Rivlin issued a public appeal. “I expect the heads of the parties
themselves to commit to a fair election campaign. This commitment should
be evident in the content and tone of their statements, and in excluding
those who attempt to distort our judgment and warp our perception of
reality. We do not want Israeli bots. We Israelis want to hear opinions
and facts,” Rivlin said.
Within the Israeli system, Rivlin has moral authority but few executive
powers. His appeal was non-binding, and it quickly became clear that the
parties would not agree to a voluntary moratorium unless all the parties
were on board, particularly Likud, which rebuffed the idea. Lapid’s
proposal went nowhere.
Melcer knew little about cyber threats to voting
