AI Deepfakes, Bots and Robocalls Shape Israel's Election Campaign
For the first time, artificial intelligence plays a major role in Israel's elections, Deutsche Welle reports. Observers warn of voter influence through deepfakes, bots, automated calls and other AI-generated content ahead of the parliamentary vote on 27 October.
A 19-second clip posted on the account of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shows his rival Gadi Eisenkot, a former chief of staff, running in slow motion across a meadow towards a person resembling his son, before passing him to hug Mansour Abbas, an Arab lawmaker and leader of the Ra'am party. The video, apparently meant to stoke anti-Arab sentiment, was watched over a million times and caused outrage, as Eisenkot's son was killed in 2023 during the Israel-Hamas war. Polls show Netanyahu and Eisenkot neck and neck.
How much AI is in the campaign
ZebeAI, a research project at the Open University of Israel, counted more than 2,000 AI-generated posts from Netanyahu's Likud by 23 October — about a quarter of the Likud material it analysed. Since late July the team has tracked all politicians' social-media posts, collecting over 52,000 on Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok and finding AI in more than 14% of them. The approach is mostly hybrid: AI for parts of campaign material such as images, music, subtitles and logos, but full deepfakes also exist. Proportionally, AI content is highest among some smaller parties; in absolute numbers Likud leads, far ahead of opposition rivals Eisenkot's Yashar and the Democrats.
In July Israel's Central Elections Committee ruled that all AI-generated or manipulated campaign content must be labelled, but few other limits apply. "There is no AI law and no digital services law, and the privacy law is quite outdated," says project head Anat Ben-David, so "you can see use of AI that would be impossible in Europe."
Examples from the campaign
A photorealistic AI video shared in September by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich purported to show Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and several Supreme Court justices being arrested at an anti-government protest. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir shared an AI video showing Palestinians carried on a conveyor belt into something resembling a concentration camp, which Germany's foreign ministry called "completely unacceptable" and "abhorrent". The electoral authority intervened in some cases, ordering Smotrich in July to remove an unlabelled AI video it called misleading.
Robocalls, bots and fake audiences
Some voters receive a new kind of automated call that sounds far more real. Disinformation researcher Nitsan Yasur of the Israel Internet Association played DW a four-minute call in which a voice introduces herself as "Danielle", a pollster; pressed on whether she was human, she admitted nobody was on the line, then asked whether to continue the "short survey". Five times Yasur asked who commissioned it and got no answer. About a quarter of Israelis are ready to consider AI tools for help choosing how to vote, according to an Israel Internet Association survey.
The media-monitoring firm Scooper told DW it found a network of fake accounts inflating Netanyahu's follower numbers, with more than 1,000 new accounts created daily on X that immediately follow him; about 70% of accounts sharing his content on X are outside Israel and resemble bots. The platform FakeReporter exposed a network of more than 100 accounts, some with AI-generated images and identities, linked to Ben-Gvir's campaign and targeting Smotrich and others; his office denies a link. Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler of the Israel Democracy Institute sees Israel as a test case for how AI changes elections worldwide: "The entire machinery of political propaganda is being changed from the ground up."
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