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Israel’s election battles fought on social networks, not at mass rallies

While Blue and White senior officials Benny Ganz and Yair Lapid have a solid presence on social networks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s activities on this platform have only gotten more sophisticated.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s leading politician on social networks. He has 2.37 million followers on Facebook, 1.54 million followers on Twitter and 594,000 followers on Instagram. He is also active on Telegram, and has other social network channels associated with the Likud Party or the Prime Minister’s Office. These are impressive numbers, especially given the fact that there are about 5.8 million Facebook subscribers in Israel (as of December 2018) and several hundred thousand Twitter users.

These open and identifiable platforms have seen a surge in activity during the current election campaign. In the final days, and especially on election day itself, these platforms can be expected to reach all-time record usage in Israel. Netanyahu’s digital team can target its messages with pinpoint precision on election day and even in the final hours if necessary, based on breakdowns of the population and user profiles. This data has been collected over time in preparation for the big day by a much larger and more sophisticated system than was available to Netanyahu in the 2015 election. Yet even then, Netanyahu was the Israeli politician with the most prominent presence on social media.

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