User Engagement with ‘Fake News’ in Israeli Politics

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Yoav Halperin, who shifts our attention to the issue of ‘fake news’. This is a problem especially in social media: there is plenty of evidence for mis- and disinformation campaigns taking place across a wide range of countries, with the aim to influence public opinion and disrupt political processes.

The aim here is to shape users’ views about particular issues, but also to shape their perceptions of broader political opinion, especially to create the impression that specific views are at more popular or unpopular than they actually are. How do social media users react to the ubiquity of online misinformation, though?

Yoav examined this by interviewing the operators of Israeli Facebook groups, who highlighted a substantial presence of ‘fake news’ in their groups. Such disinformation campaigns are now prevalent in Israeli politics, and many fingers are pointed at Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his political supporters, who are apparently running networks of bots to support the PM and slander his rivals. Netanyahu responded to this by rolling out the supposed operator of one of the purported bots, to demonstrate that he was ‘not a robot’.

Left-wing group operators suggest that online spaces are dominated by the right wing of Israeli politics, and overwhelmed by right-wing content, and that bots and fake accounts play a very substantial in this. This makes leftists feel fewer, smaller, and weaker than their rivals, although this may not actually reflect current public opinion. This has a chilling effect on leftists, group operators suggest.

Conversely, right-wing group operators believe such accusations to be delusional, born out of a desperate perception by leftists that they cannot possibly be in the minority, and that right-wingers must necessarily be stupid, corrupt, of bots.

Leftists use their perceptions to maintain their cause, and assure their supporters that Facebook does not accurately reflect Israeli society. Right-wingers use theirs to maintain a perception of their numerical superiority – and interpretations of the online experience in Israel are thus also themselves being operationalised in the political contest.

Users who encounter suspected manipulative accounts could of course report or ignore these accounts, but often they instead engage with these accounts in order to label and attack them as ‘fake’. This ‘you’re fake’ (or ‘you’re a paid commenter’) rhetorical strategy is sometimes also directed at genuine profiles, and seeks to delegitimise and stigmatise political opponents, excluding them from meaningful political discussion and debate. In this way, the accusation of ‘fakeness’ is weaponised in the political conflict; this demonstrates the rhetorical repertoire that has now emerged as part of the ‘fake news’ discourse.