Twitter suspends accounts aiming fake news at the Israeli public
The Speaker of Israel’s Knesset, Yuli Edelstein, rejected a request by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean, to which Israel belongs, to monitor the national election set for April 9.
#Elections Israel: Twitter suspends yet another batch of 61 accounts with a total of 28,041 followers, all linked to foreign #FakeNews manipulation campaigns aimed at Israeli public. A total of 343 #bot accounts suspended since elections announcedCSV: https://t.co/0JXKbwIMEu pic.twitter.com/mGgrA2v0zx— Elad Ratson (@EladRatson) January 28, 2019
Meanwhile, Facebook announced in a statement on Monday that it would launch in various countries, including Israel, “additional tools to help prevent foreign interference and make political and issue advertising on Facebook more transparent.” Advertisers will need to be authorized to purchase political ads; Facebook will give people more information about ads related to politics and issues; and it will create a publicly searchable library of these ads for up to seven years, the statement said.
The new tools will be launched in March, in the last weeks of Israel’s election campaign, with a global rollout planned for June.
On Sunday, the Speaker of Israel’s Knesset, Yuli Edelstein, rejected a request by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean, to which Israel belongs, to monitor the national election set for April 9, the Times of Israel reported. The interparliamentary group, made up of 26 European, North African and Middle Eastern parliaments, noted that foreign and local groups had threatened to attempt to influence the elections, mostly on-line, according to the report.
Edelstein called the request “an unparalleled expression of arrogance.”