Most Online Support for Netanyahu Comes from Non-Israeli Accounts, Data Shows

Data analyzed by the research project "The Current Situation" and the company Scoop reveals that among the leading candidates in the upcoming Israeli elections, Benjamin Netanyahu receives the lowest proportion of support from Israeli accounts on the social media platform X. Only 28.5 percent of accounts sharing Netanyahu's posts are Israeli, compared to 90 percent for Gadi Eizenkot and 87.6 percent for Yair Golan, leader of the Democratic Party.

Additional indicators of limited genuine Israeli support for Netanyahu include a low percentage of Hebrew usernames among his supporters (6.8 percent), significantly less than for other candidates such as Bezalel Smotrich (30 percent) or Eizenkot (26 percent). Moreover, Netanyahu's supporters have the highest share of accounts with numeric strings in their usernames (34.8 percent), which may suggest automated or bot-generated accounts. This contrasts with 20 percent for Golan and 21.7 percent for Eizenkot.

The most striking finding is the prevalence of newly created accounts among Netanyahu's supporters, with 11.3 percent of these accounts opened in recent months, compared to only 2.8 percent for Eizenkot and 3.2 percent for Golan. Researcher Gil Feldman interprets these patterns as evidence of an orchestrated effort to artificially boost Netanyahu's online support, stating, "Someone is operating the machine that promotes these posts and creates fake support for the man on the network."