<nettime> Adam Entous: How Israel Limited Online Deception During Its Election (The New Yorker)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

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 machines, or about the 
role of social media and the Internet in modern information warfare, 
when, in April, 2017, his colleagues on the fifteen-member Supreme Court 
unanimously nominated him to chair the Elections Committee.

Melcer, who is sixty-eight, has never had a social-media account. 
(Israeli rules prevent sitting justices from having them, a government 
official said.) His first major decision as chairman of the Central 
Elections Committee, in late 2017, was to reject a proposal to deploy, 
in limited numbers, computerized voting machines, citing concerns that 
the systems could be vulnerable to hackers.

In the United States, election oversight is divided between state and 
local authorities and a patchwork of federal agencies and intelligence 
services. The disparate organizations, by tradition, do not readily 
coördinate with one another, though efforts have been made recently to 
change that dynamic. Israel’s more centralized system of using senior 
Supreme Court justices to administer elections dates back to the 
country’s founding. Melcer, who is required to retire from the court in 
two years, when he turns seventy, can afford to take controversial 
positions, unlike politicians and ordinary government officials who are 
less independent.

Shachar Ben Meir, an Israeli lawyer who specializes in bringing 
class-action cases, a couple of which have targeted Facebook, was 
disappointed that Likud had blocked the passage of legislation to update 
the country’s transparency laws to include campaign activities using the 
Internet and social media. In January, he and a partner at his law firm, 
Isaac Aviram, filed a petition with Melcer, arguing that he should 
simply “apply these very old laws to a new situation.”

Shortly thereafter, in a Knesset hearing room, Melcer presented 
representatives from Israel’s political parties with an ultimatum: they 
could either reach an agreement among themselves not to conduct covert 
campaigns on the Internet and social media, or he would consider banning 
the practice, unilaterally, through Election Day. Violators could be 
held in contempt of court and fined. “You know what? If you sign the 
informal agreement, it would make life easier for all sides. I will not 
have to give a ruling and you will have some standards to implement 
before the election,” Melcer said, according to Altshuler, who was 
present.

All but one of Israel’s political parties said they would accept the 
proposed restrictions. “Except for Likud, they all said, ‘Yes, we’re 
O.K. with this,’ ” Ben Meir told me. Likud argued that Melcer did not 
have the authority to impose a decision, and that only the Knesset could 
change the rules.

Melcer had come up with the idea of the ban after reading various books 
about free speech in the Internet age, including a 2016 work by Eric 
Barendt, an emeritus professor of law at University College London. 
(Reached by phone, Barendt said he had never spoken to Melcer and was 
unaware, until I called him, that his book had played a role in the 
Israeli elections.)

After the political parties failed to reach a voluntary agreement, 
Melcer imposed a ban in late February. Likud had the option of 
challenging Melcer’s judgment by filing a petition to the Supreme Court, 
but chose not to do so, effectively accepting the decision.

In January, representatives from Facebook and Google met separately with 
Melcer in his private chambers, where he presented them with a choice, 
similar to the one he gave Israel’s political parties. The companies 
could voluntarily take down anonymous accounts and unattributed messages 
associated with foreign actors and Israeli political parties. If they 
refused to do so, Melcer reserved the right to issue court orders 
compelling the companies to act. Israeli officials said Facebook and the 
other companies were noncommittal at first. “They said they had to think 
it over. They seemed unhappy,” a government official said. But later the 
companies told Melcer they would coöperate. Under the arrangement, 
Israeli political parties could identify suspicious accounts and 
content, and ask the social-media companies to remove them. If the 
companies weren’t responsive, then the political parties could appeal to 
Melcer directly for a decision. For weeks, the political parties seemed 
satisfied. Suspicious accounts and content were removed, and the parties 
didn’t ask Melcer to intervene.

About two weeks before the vote, however, the party of an Arab-Israeli 
politician, who asked not to be identified, complained to Facebook about 
messages that he said were derogatory and false. The politician asked 
Facebook to take the messages down. When the social-media company did 
not respond to the request, the legislator’s party asked Melcer to 
intervene. After reviewing the messages, Melcer ruled that Facebook had 
to act. Melcer did not address whether the accusations were true or 
false. Instead, he ruled that the messages should be removed because 
they were being spread anonymously.

Facebook complied with Melcer’s order, but, soon after, the same 
allegation against the Knesset member was reposted by others, prompting 
Melcer to issue a second takedown order. When the same thing happened a 
third time, the legislator’s party asked Melcer to order Facebook to 
reveal who set up the anonymous accounts which had spread the messages 
against him. Melcer has yet to rule in the case. A Facebook spokesman 
said, “When we receive adequate legal notice from a competent government 
authority, like a court order requiring the removal of unlawful content 
under local law, we review that order and take appropriate action.” 
Google and Twitter declined to comment.

After Israel’s vote, countries that are home to nearly half of the 
world’s population are slated to cast ballots in 2019. Melcer’s office 
declined to provide specific data, but an official there estimated that 
the number of anonymous messages related to the campaign fell by more 
than fifty per cent. “Israel went first. Everybody was looking to see 
how we handled it,” a government official told me. “We set a precedent 
and may be a model.”

(Bwo Eduard de Jong Frz.)

PS
First Dog on the Moon puts the issue a bit more graphically:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/20/facebook-google-twitter-theyd-still-be-dreadful-without-the-fascists
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