Germany to assess report on Israeli firm's manipulation of elections worldwide

By Oliver Towfigh Nia

BERLIN (AA) – Germany is looking into media reports about an Israeli company manipulating elections in over 30 countries, a government spokesman said on Wednesday.

“First of all, I think I can say that we first evaluate such reports to see exactly what this is about. All other questions will be answered afterwards. We will first clarify internally as to how we would then react, and we may then be able to report on it publicly afterwards,” Steffen Hebestreit told reporters in Berlin.

He stressed that Germany does not tolerate meddling by a foreign state in the election process of another country.

“We do not tolerate disinformation in the context of elections, since elections are one of the central decision-making processes in our democracy, especially not disinformation from a foreign state, i.e. illegitimate influence by another state on Germany,” Hebestreit said.

According to an international investigative team, the Israeli company, which uses the codename “Team Jorge,” had manipulated elections worldwide for money.

Former military and intelligence agents reportedly used fake news and hacking methods to achieve their objectives.

The reports are based on six hours of secretly recorded conversations in which company boss Tal Hanan and his team outlined their services.

The team has so far interfered in 33 national election campaigns and votes, including in Kenya and Nigeria, the reports said.

Tal Hanan could be heard saying in the recordings that 27 of the missions were successful.

For manipulation on social media, the team had developed its own platform called “Aims,” which could be used to create verified user accounts.

However, not all claims could be independently verified, the reports said.

According to the report, the company is based in the Israeli city of Modiin, which is about halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The team controlled an “army” of more than 30,000 bots, profiles on social media that are not backed by real people, British daily The Guardian reported on Wednesday.

These were extremely cleverly designed and are simultaneously represented on various platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

According to the team, they were also able to hack Telegram and Gmail.

With the help of smear campaigns and stolen information, public opinion was specifically influenced, the report said.

Hanan charged between $400,000 and $600,000 a month for his services. The Israeli businessman has denied any wrongdoing, the report added.