About half of the politically active accounts on Israeli social media are not real people but rather bots, including many of those boosting posts by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his right-wing coalition, according to an investigation by Channel 12 news.

The report, which aired on Friday night, found that Netanyahu and his allies use bots to “like” and share their posts almost immediately after the content is uploaded, in order to convince the platforms’ algorithms to recommend it to other users.

“When he posts a five-minute video in Hebrew, in the first 60 seconds, most of the shares are from abroad, and [those] posts happen within about five seconds,” Jonathan Hasidim, of the Scooper research group, told Channel 12.

The report cited a negative post about the Brothers in Arms protest group and a reaction to the slaying of policeman 1st Sgt. Niv Peretz as examples of posts by the premier that were clearly boosted by bots.

He explained that in the latter case, “the initial [response] was very strong, 70% from abroad, and after that we see a decline.” Hasidim told the network: “It’s a trend-graph that’s very characteristic of........

© The Times of Israel