The Death of Proof

The law that still governs election propaganda in Israel was written in 1959, and it is a charming document. It bars campaigns from handing out gifts. It bars propaganda accompanied by variety acts, by music, by films, and by torches. It requires every printed item to carry the name of the print shop and the name of whoever ordered it.

In January, a report on Channel 12 did a simple piece of arithmetic. Accounts tied to Israeli politicians were liking and sharing campaign videos within seconds of publication. The videos ran for minutes. They were applauding, in other words, without having watched. No public has ever been so punctual.

The Americans invented this in the fifties and gave the thing a name. A Hollywood sound engineer called Charley Douglass built a machine full of canned guffaws, christened it the Laff Box, kept the key in his pocket, and set about injecting other people’s laughter into studio comedies so that nobody would laugh alone at home. It worked so well that across sixty years of sitcoms not one of us could separate his own amusement from everybody else’s. Now we have a box of our own. Close to half the politically active accounts on Israeli social media do not belong to people.

The swarm was clustered around accounts tied to the prime minister and to figures in the coalition. The experts then checked the accounts of Yair Lapid and Yair Golan, by way of comparison, and found nothing of the kind. Two accounts are not the whole opposition, and the finding may mean virtue or it may mean a shortage of money. You place the bet.

The one who moved was not the government, which in this story stands on the other side of the counter, but the elections committee. Since the twenty-sixth of July, campaign material made or altered by artificial intelligence has had to carry a disclosure. The rules are meticulous about form. In images and printed matter the disclosure must occupy five per cent of the height of the content, in video it must stay visible throughout, and in audio it must be spoken at the beginning and at the end. Sixty-seven years on, the legislator has gone back to what he does well, which is to specify how big things ought to be. So we now know how big honesty is. Five per cent. Less than you leave as a tip.

Justice Noam Sohlberg, who chairs the committee, ordered Minister Bezalel Smotrich to delete a video in which a figure resembling Gadi Eisenkot shook hands with Mahmoud Abbas, a meeting that never took place. Sohlberg rejected the argument that the disclosure was enough, because on Facebook nobody notices the disclosure. The man charged with enforcing the rule wrote that the rule does not hold. The order was obeyed for one reason only. There was a minister with a name to receive it. A name is what half the network does not have.

In July the prime minister posted on his own account a video made by artificial intelligence in which Eisenkot embraces Mansour Abbas and walks straight past a young man whom many people recognized as Gal, his son, killed in Gaza in December 2023 during an operation to recover the bodies of hostages. Likud denied any intent and reposted the piece with the young man swapped for a woman. Erasing a dead son from inside an image took an afternoon. On Friday he posted another one on X, in which Erdogan, the Iranian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, and Zohran Mamdani arrange a party to celebrate his fall and call the whole thing off when the news comes through that he has won. It closes with the Likud name. Labelled, I assume, to the regulation five per cent.

It used to be done differently. In 1959 there was a complaint that clerks of the citrus marketing board were working for Mapai, and two years later came the ban on using public resources in campaigns. Manufacturing enthusiasm took people on the payroll, paid hours, a room, oranges, and somebody who knew too much. It was expensive and it left a trail, which is why one sentence was enough to forbid it.

What we are losing is not the truth, which sits where it has always sat, intact and of no use. It is proof. If any image may have been fabricated, no image obliges anybody to do anything, and whoever cannot prove anything cannot hold anyone to account. Proof was what an ordinary citizen held in his hand to force a powerful man to answer, and it worked because fabrication was expensive. It got cheap.

A survey at the end of August polled a thousand and five Israelis. Seventy-one per cent have already run into false information about the election. A quarter intend to consult an artificial intelligence to decide their vote. Tired of not knowing whom to believe, the voter will ask the AI, and the campaigns, which read the same survey I did, are already writing so that the models will repeat them. He will consult the oracle and will get the campaign back, accentless and nameless.

Elsewhere this has already run its course. Trump in 2020, and the Capitol stormed by people convinced the theft had happened. Keiko Fujimori in 2021, demanding the annulment of two hundred thousand rural votes without producing evidence of anything. Bolsonaro in 2022, his party fined for litigating in bad faith, and thousands camped outside the barracks for two months asking the army to void the result. And so that nobody leaves here with a comfortable symmetry, this year in Peru it was the defeated candidate of the left who spent weeks alleging irregularities. The technique belongs to nobody in particular. It belongs to whoever lost.

The most instructive case is the Romanian one. In December 2024 the constitutional court annulled the entire first round after the intelligence services described a coordinated campaign on TikTok and Telegram, with thousands of accounts, undeclared money, and the probable hand of a foreign state. The election could be annulled because the campaign could be shown. Without proof, both versions stay available forever, and everyone takes home the one he prefers.

I am not writing this to frighten anybody. Fright is the cheapest commodity in this campaign. The claim is narrower and it is worse. This is likely the last Israeli election in which fabrication still costs enough to leave a trail. The tools that made the July video already cost less than the ones from June. Four years from now, the five per cent disclosure will look to us the way the ban on torches looks to us today.