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First Romania, Now Israel: Pro-Russian AI Disinformation Campaign Preps for Israeli Election
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Floral wood carvings are a common motif in both the Romanian and Hebrew-language Facebook groups.
Conservative AI slop aimed at religious audiences is just the first phase of foreign influence operations which gained thousands of followers by piggybacking on the Gaza war - laying the groundwork for election chaos
Omer Benjakob
05:04 PM • September 14th 2025 IDT
"Welcome to Mothers Cook Together! The tastiest, warmest Facebook group there is ??," read the description of the seemingly innocent Facebook group. "Here mothers (and also grandmothers, sisters, aunts...) share recipes, kitchen tips, photos of their successes (or their failures ??)..." As of Saturday, the group had 13,000 members — not bad, considering it was created just a few months ago.
It is likely that its members — most of them real Israeli women — were likely looking for a different, popular group by the exact same name that was founded in 2014 and has more than 850,000 members. But by Sunday morning, after Haaretz reached out to Meta, Facebook had removed the group.
The fake group is one of a larger network of bogus profiles and pages set up as part of a foreign influence operation that has been active on Israeli social media for several months and threatens to sow chaos and disrupt the election scheduled for November 2026. At this stage, the operation is still in its initial stages — focused on drawing in Israeli followers, partly through content generated by artificial intelligence — laying the infrastructure needed to disrupt elections in the future.
The campaign seems almost identical to another social media campaign that wreaked havoc last year in Romania and disrupted that country's election — until the court....
haaretz.com
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