The law that still governs election propaganda in Israel was written in 1959, and it is a charming document. It bars campaigns from handing out gifts. It bars propaganda accompanied by variety acts, by music, by films, and by torches. It requires every printed item to carry the name of the print shop and the name of whoever ordered it.

In January, a report on Channel 12 did a simple piece of arithmetic. Accounts tied to Israeli politicians were liking and sharing campaign videos within seconds of publication. The videos ran for minutes. They were applauding, in other words, without having watched. No public has ever been so punctual.

The Americans invented this in the fifties and gave the thing a name. A Hollywood sound engineer called Charley Douglass built a machine full of canned guffaws, christened it the Laff Box, kept the key in his pocket, and set about injecting other people’s laughter into studio comedies so that nobody would laugh alone at home. It worked so well that across sixty years of sitcoms not one of us could separate his own amusement from everybody else’s. Now we have a box of our own. Close to half the politically active accounts on Israeli social media do not belong to people.

The swarm was clustered around accounts tied to the prime minister and to figures in the coalition. The experts then checked the accounts of Yair Lapid and Yair Golan, by way of comparison, and found nothing of the kind. Two accounts are not the whole opposition, and the finding may mean virtue or it may mean a shortage of money. You place the bet.

The one who........

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