On January 8, Shin Bet head Nadav Argaman told an audience in Tel Aviv that Russia is sure to meddle in the upcoming Israeli election.

“I can’t say at this point for whom or against whom,” Argaman said, “but it involves cyber [attacks] and hacking.”

That Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election in the United States is a given. But Moscow has designs beyond Washington. At a recent talk at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, Dr. Col. (res.) Gabi Siboni described how sophisticated influence campaigns operate and how bad actors use social media platforms to target their messages to you and me.

Saboni emphasized that we are in the midst of an information revolution. Never before has it been so easy to move large amounts of information around the world or so simple for advertisers and spy agencies alike to customize experiences and messages to individuals. This is in part because large media companies like Google and Facebook have profiled each and every one of us, using more than 100 parameters to build an online sketch that identifies our proclivities — everything from our favorite brand of marshmallows to predicting our next automobile purchase.

Oddly, few of us seem to realize how much we are targeted. A recent Pew Research Center study found that 74% of Facebook users surveyed said they did not know the social media giant maintained a list of their interests and traits. When confronted with this information, 51% said they were uncomfortable being profiled. When shown their individual Facebook profiles, 27% said they were not accurate. Facebook also compiles information on users’ political affiliation.

Most of us browse online carefree, not thinking too much about the data collected. It is precisely this ambivalence that undergirds the online advertising industry. According to a recent analysis of the Pew study in New York magazine:

…if you use the internet with any regularity and don’t also take significant steps to obscure your identity, advertisers are able to target you with pretty unnerving specificity… determining things like your age, religion, and marital status…

Data brokers aggregate data about you based on what sites you visit, what you buy, how often you use a credit card, and the paper trail you leave from getting married or buying a car or changing addresses, and bundle this information to sell to other firms that help target ads to you. It’s a multibillion-dollar business that shows no signs of slowing down. (One estimate from the Financial Times says data brokers will earn about $120 billion per year in Europe alone by 2020.)

In the hands of a state intelligence agency, or just a political campaign with nefarious intentions, information gleaned from data brokers has proven capable of manipulating opinions. Saboni pointed to examples of Russia massaging public opinion in the Brexit vote, and elections in France, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland.

And it’s not even live, breathing people who are attempting to manipulate your opinions, but bots created by programmers complete with fake identities, fictional histories, and computer-generated faces. This last detail should give us extra pause. In the past, online manipulators might have stolen someone’s picture and personal background, but that’s no longer necessary. According to an article in the Telegraph, artificial intelligence experts can now create images of human faces that are indistinguishable from real photos:

Researchers trained their computer with 70,000 photos of real people from Flickr, which included different ages, ethnicity, and image backgrounds. Using these images as a base, the computer was able to learn and segment aspects of different people — such as hair color, face shape, or skin color — and generate completely new images.

My untrained eye could not tell the difference between these computer-generated images of “people” and real human beings.

So, to recap, state actors with bad intentions, along with big digital media companies, have built online profiles of millions and millions of users that are used in a targeted and scientific fashion to sway your opinion on who might be the best next president of the United States, whether democracy is overrated, or whether it’s time to buy a new blender.

In the Israeli context, Saboni said the Jewish state is perhaps less prone to interference than other societies because, well, its people are so stubborn. It’s hard to convince them of anything, he said, no matter how many times you tell them something. Yet another advantage of being a stiff-necked people.

(Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 745)