Go fake yourself: 7 things to know for April 2

1. Real trolls: After a report alleging a Likud campaign involving hundreds of fake social media accounts, the party is pushing back, including by introducing one of the supposedly fake account-holders to a press conference.

• Other Twitter users featured in the newspaper reports also spoke to media outlets on Monday to prove they were real.
• Ziv Knobler told Army Radio that “nothing is organized. We are a group of people who believe in the way of Benjamin Netanyahu.”
• “Blessed be He who maketh the bots live,” reads a sarcastic front page headline in Israel Hayom, riffing off a passage from the daily Amida prayer.
• The paper trots out yet more of who they say are the real activists behind the accounts, and in a stunt, three columnists all run pieces under the headline “I am a bot.”
• “After speaking with a bunch of people misidentified as right-wing bots, I realized something: I am also a bot. Or at least I can be identified as one,” columnist Akiva Bigman writes.

2. But who said anything about bots? Likud’s push to prove that there are real people behind the account seems somewhat disingenuous, since the report Monday did not allege that they were bots.

“These were Twitter accounts with pseudonyms, actually, which were controlled by flesh and blood people, even if they were concealing their true identities,” pushes back Yedioth Ahronoth’s Ronen Bergman, who first published about the report in the paper and in The New York Times.

“Bergman did not assert that all of the network’s account were bogus and the fact that some of them aren’t doesn’t negate the existence of an organized network disseminating slander and lies about Likud’s rivals,” Haaretz’s Chemi Shalev writes.

He adds that “the brouhaha is essentially much ado about nothing, a filler for the temporary vacuum in the election campaign,” since so few Israelis are on Twitter.

3. Captain potty-mouth: The man brought out by Netanyahu, Giora Ezra or “Captain George,” is real.

• But as journalists quickly discovered, he also has a real history as a real piece of work.
• Among the stuff dug up about him, are a bevy of posts backing extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, calling journalists things like “a stinking dog,” and using a homophobic slur.
• Yedioth notes that “many of the account owners quickly restricted access to their tweets and others erased theirs.”
• Yitzhak Haddad, who was identified as the one running the network, shut down his account altogether, the paper reports.

4. Waiting for WhatsApp: In Haaretz, Anshel Pfeffer quotes researchers who say that while Twitter is small potatoes, once campaigns figure out how to mess with WhatsApp, which is used by almost all Israelis, it will be a whole new ballgame.

• “WhatsApp groups are the great untested election weapon,” Boaz Dolev, CEO of cybersecurity company ClearSky, is quoted as saying. “WhatsApp is quick and anonymous, and we’ve already seen what looks like trial runs.”
• There had been fears before the election that WhatsApp would become a battleground, as happened in Brazil last year.

5. Jair the redeemer: As it happens, the man helped by those WhatsApp fake news campaigns, Jair Bolsonaro, is in Israel.

• He may not have gone ahead with moving his embassy to Jerusalem, but on Monday, Bolsonaro became the first head of state to visit the Western Wall with an Israeli official, Netanyahu.
• The gesture may not be enough, though, and Israel Hayom plays up the fact that Bolsonaro said while on tour in the Old City that he may still move the embassy.
• The decision to not open the embassy seems to also have not satisfied the Palestinians, whose ambassador in Brasilia, Ibrahim Alzeban, tells Reuters that Ramallah is mulling recalling him.
• “From what I was told, it will depend on how (Bolsonaro’s) visit evolves,” Alzeban says. “We wish that the subject of Jerusalem had not been touched upon.”

6. Ruby Tuesday: ToI’s Raoul Wootliff writes that campaign rhetoric may be heating up, but both main parties are really looking to one man who may decide their fate — President Reuven Rivlin.

• Wootliff notes that Blue and White is campaigning on the idea that if it is the largest party, it will get the first crack at forming a coalition, but that’s not necessarily true. Rather, it will be up to Rivlin to choose whoever he thinks has the best chance of forming a coalition, with polls showing Netanyahu doing handily.
• Still, “Blue and White’s stated strategy relies on a simple calculation: The better they do on Election Day, the more the race will be decided by … Rivlin.”
• Rivlin has offered few clues as to what he will do, posing a series of questions recently to students about his various options, but no answers.
• There is also a third option, Wootliff writes: “It is completely within Rivlin’s constitutional purview to offer both Gantz and Netanyahu an ultimatum: agree to a national unity government, dividing the premiership by rotation, or see your opponent get the first chance at premier.”
• Dr. Ofer Kenig, a senior lecturer at the Ashkelon Academic College and a research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, says that is “the most realistic [scenario].”

7. Shooting within the bloc? In Walla, reporter Tal Shalev thinks the decider will actually be Moshe Kahlon, who can swing his projected four seats in either direction.

• “The battle between Netanyahu and Gantz gets the most limelight, but the small parties, which will determine who the president picks as the winner, have a central role and the place of Kahlon is the most dramatic of all,” she writes.
• “Likud knows well how squishy its coalition base is, and has kept for weeks now from shooting inside the APC, aiming its negative campaign at Gantz alone,” she writes.
• Gantz, meanwhile, is doing the opposite, she writes, trying to push Likud into a corner that will force it to try and steal votes from its natural partners, possibly pushing them below the threshold.
• Israel Hayom reports that Likud is already considering pointing its campaign against the right, specifically the New Right.
• A party source claims that Likud is fed up with Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked campaigning against Netanyahu.
• “Bennett and Shaked have not stopped shooting within the APC, they’ve gone too far,” the source is quoted saying. “They said they split off [from Jewish Home] to snag votes from Gantz, but they haven’t stopped attacking Netanyahu from within the bloc.”