Puppets with poor Hebrew
Ratson said that while many social media users are behaving in ways that feel authentic to them, they are all constantly being manipulated by interested parties in ways they may not understand.
During the conflict, state and quasi-state actors were working covertly to steer online discussions surrounding the fighting between Israel and Hamas, he asserted.
“There are a lot of elements that finance the promotion of anti-Israeli content,” he said. “It’s actually more common than you think.”
Social media networks make it possible, he said, with varying degrees of ease, for a third party to pay for the promotion of content posted by someone they may not even know. Nor do social media companies require the identity of that third party to be disclosed.