Israel asks Twitter to take down dozens of Twitterbots spewing anti-Israeli posts
Strategic Affairs Ministry says campaign sought to fake grassroots public anger against Israel
Israel has reached out to Twitter with a request to shut down dozens of fake profiles stirring up anti-Israeli sentiments, the Strategic Affairs Ministry said Tuesday.
In its report, it provided an overview of inauthentic Twitter activity driven by technological means, it shed some light on how Twitterbots were deployed to boost efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state.
In early July 2020, the ministry picked up an uptick of Twitter chatter on the International Criminal Court (ICC) probe into alleged war crimes in Gaza and West Bank.
It pointed at the #ICC4Israel hashtag as one of the examples, saying that out of 15,000 tweets posted under it, 3,200 -- more than one in five -- were connected with inauthentic accounts.
In a sample of 250 handles suspected of inauthentic activity,170 have been found to be breaching Twitter's rules, the ministry said, reaching out to the social giant with a request to take them down.
It said it had been able to identify two major networks of more than 30 interlinked accounts each working to amplify the anti-Israeli messaging at a sensitive time for the Jewish state.
"This widespread effort to coordinate inauthentic accounts was an intentional campaign to manipulate public sentiment against Israel by claiming it was a widespread, authentic and popular movement," the report said.
The ministry vowed to keep on with such reviews in a bid to spot more bot-driven campaigns aimed at Israel's delegitimization.