Daniel sent us this one — he spotted an article in a Jewish paper about Israel belatedly waking up to Iranian electoral interference. There have been substantiated instances of Iranian botnets targeting Israeli voters, but Daniel wants to zoom out. He's asking three things. One, how long has this practice actually been going on in global history? Two, beyond the obvious stuff — botnets and meme campaigns — what are the quieter ways governments meddle in foreign elections? And three, is there a line between legitimate interest and outright interference, or is any direct involvement inherently problematic? His framing is sharp: electoral meddling is to regime change what white-collar crime is to armed robbery. Quieter, more deniable, but potentially just as destabilizing.
That white-collar framing is exactly right. And the article he's referencing — it's a Times of Israel piece from this month, July — details Iranian botnets operating on WhatsApp and Telegram, pushing divisive content around Israel's judicial reform debate and the Palestinian conflict. But here's what jumped out at me: the article frames this as Israel belatedly waking up, which implies this has been running for a while before anyone noticed.
Which is sort of the whole point of the quiet approach. If you do it right, nobody realizes anything happened until the election's over and the damage is done.
So let's step back and ask: what are we actually talking about when we say electoral interference?
Because the phrase gets thrown around a lot, and it covers a pretty wide spectrum.
At its core, electoral interference is any deliberate attempt by a foreign power to shape a sovereign state's electoral outcome. That spans everything from subtle nudges — a well-timed diplomatic statement, a trade deal suddenly contingent on who wins — all the way to outright manipulation: hacking voter databases, funding opposition parties covertly, running disinformation networks. The key word is deliberate. It's not about foreigners having opinions. It's about foreigners acting on those opinions through organized operations.
The thing that makes it uniquely corrosive for democracies is that the entire system rests on the idea that voters are deciding freely. When a foreign power intervenes, it breaks that contract. Even if the interference doesn't change the outcome, it changes how people feel about the outcome.
That's the distinction I want to sit with for a second. A lot of people assume the goal is always to get a specific candidate elected. And sometimes it is. But increasingly, the goal is process-oriented rather than outcome-oriented — it's about making the winner look illegitimate regardless of who wins. If you can convince thirty percent of the population that the election was rigged or manipulated, you've done real damage to that country's political stability without ever having to pick a favorite.
That's a much cheaper investment than actually trying to flip an election. You don't need to know who's going to win. You just need to make sure half the country doesn't trust the result.
To understand where we are now, we need to look at where this all started — and it goes back a lot further than most people think.
How far back are we talking?
First century BCE. Caesar's political rivals used bribery and propaganda extensively to sway the Roman assemblies. Caesar himself spent vast sums — money borrowed from Crassus, mostly — to secure support for his legislative agenda and his military commands. This wasn't foreign interference in the modern sense because Rome was an empire and these were internal power struggles, but the techniques are recognizable. Paid mobs to intimidate voters. Pamphlets spreading rumors about opponents.
The medium changes but the impulse doesn't.
The impulse is ancient. Fast forward to the Cold War, and you get the modern template. The Soviet Union ran what they called active measures — a whole doctrine of covert influence operations. In the 1948 Italian election, the Soviets funded communist parties and front organizations to try to defeat the Christian Democrats. The US, through the CIA, poured money into those same Christian Democrats to keep the communists out. Both sides were meddling in the same election simultaneously.
The 1948 Italian election was basically a proxy war fought with campaign contributions.
That's exactly what it was. The CIA spent an estimated sixty-five million dollars over the Cold War propping up Italian centrist and center-right parties. The Soviets spent heavily on the Italian Communist Party. Neither side was particularly subtle about it — they just didn't advertise it to Italian voters.
This pattern repeated across the decolonizing world throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies. The US and USSR both meddled in post-colonial elections across Africa and Latin America. Pick a country holding its first independent election and you'll probably find both superpowers trying to tilt the outcome.
The scale of it during the Cold War was staggering. There's a study by Dov Levin at Carnegie Mellon — he documented over one hundred instances of electoral interference by the US and USSR between 1946 and 2000. That's not allegations or suspicions. That's documented cases. The US alone intervened in something like eighty-one foreign elections during that period.
So when Americans get outraged about Russian interference, the honest answer is — we wrote the playbook.
We absolutely did. And that's not a whataboutism. It's context that matters for understanding why this is so hard to regulate internationally. No major power has clean hands. Everyone's done it. The difference now isn't the practice — it's the tools and the scale.
Which brings us to the digital inflection point.
2016 wasn't the first digital interference operation, but it was the first to use social media at scale in a way that genuinely changed the conversation. The Russian Internet Research Agency — the IRA, a troll farm based in St. Petersburg — ran a coordinated influence campaign that reached an estimated one hundred twenty-six million Facebook users. They bought thousands of ads, created hundreds of fake accounts and pages, organized real-world rallies in the US by posing as American activist groups.
Simultaneously you had the GRU hack-and-leak operation — the DNC emails.
GRU units, specifically Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, breached Democratic National Committee servers, stole internal emails, and then released them through fronts called DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.The strategy was two-pronged: flood social media with divisive content to inflame existing tensions, and selectively leak embarrassing private communications to damage one candidate.
The social media part is what gets talked about most, but the hack-and-leak component is arguably more sophisticated. It's not just noise — it's weaponized truth. Real documents, real emails, released strategically to inflict maximum political damage.
That playbook has been copied and refined since. Iran, China, North Korea — they all studied 2016 and built their own versions. Which brings us to the Iranian-Israeli case Daniel flagged.
What's actually happening there? What did the Times of Israel piece detail?
The article reports that Iranian-linked botnets have been operating on WhatsApp and Telegram, targeting Israeli voters with content designed to amplify internal divisions. The two main vectors are the judicial reform debate — which has been the most polarizing domestic issue in Israel for the past couple of years — and the Palestinian conflict. The bots pose as Israeli citizens, join local groups, and push inflammatory content from both extremes.
They're not picking a side in the traditional sense. They're picking both sides simultaneously, trying to make each side hate the other more.
That's the process-oriented approach I mentioned. Iran's goal here doesn't appear to be electing a specific candidate or party. It's destabilization. If Israeli society is consumed by internal conflict, that's a strategic win for Tehran regardless of who sits in the prime minister's office.
Which is a shift worth noting. The old model — pick a candidate, fund them covertly, hope they win — that's outcome-oriented. This new model says: we don't care who wins, as long as the country is ungovernable afterward.
The Iranian playbook in Israel draws directly from the Russian playbook in the US, but with a regional twist. Iran understands Israeli society's fault lines intimately. They know exactly which issues will generate maximum outrage on both sides. The judicial reform protests gave them a perfect opening — a deeply emotional, divisive domestic issue where injecting a little extra poison on both sides could significantly escalate tensions.
It's like finding a crack in a dam and just tapping a wedge into it. You don't need to break the dam yourself. The water pressure does the work.
That's the metaphor exactly. And the scary part is how cheap this is. Running a botnet on WhatsApp and Telegram costs a fraction of what the CIA spent on Italian political parties. You don't need suitcases of cash. You need a few skilled operators, some server infrastructure, and a deep understanding of the target country's media ecosystem.
Botnets and troll farms are the flashy stuff. The headlines grabbers. But the interference toolkit is much bigger — and much quieter.
This is what I think Daniel was really driving at with his second question. What else is out there beyond the obvious?
Let's go through the spectrum.
First category: economic coercion. This is probably the most under-discussed form of electoral interference because it doesn't look like interference. It looks like normal international relations. A government threatens to withdraw trade deals, impose tariffs, or pull investment unless a favorable candidate wins. China has been particularly effective at this through the Belt and Road Initiative.
Give me a concrete example.
Sri Lanka, 2015. China had invested heavily in Sri Lankan infrastructure — ports, roads, power plants — through Belt and Road loans. When the election brought in a government that was less friendly to Chinese interests, Beijing made it clear that future investment and debt restructuring depended on political cooperation. The new government found itself squeezed between its campaign promises and economic reality.
The Maldives in 2018.
China had extended significant loans for infrastructure projects. When political winds shifted, debt restructuring became contingent on maintaining favorable policies toward Chinese investments. The message doesn't need to be explicit. Everyone at the negotiating table understands the leverage.
It's interference by spreadsheet. Much harder to detect, much harder to prove, and arguably more effective than a thousand bot accounts.
Second category: diplomatic signaling. This is the public endorsement or condemnation that shifts domestic political dynamics. Russia's overt praise of Marine Le Pen during the 2017 French presidential election is a textbook case. Putin didn't need to hack anything. He just needed to publicly signal that Moscow preferred Le Pen, knowing that this endorsement would energize her base while also creating a controversy that dominated news cycles.
The endorsement itself becomes the story, and the story crowds out substantive policy discussion.
Third category: covert funding of political parties and candidates. This is the old-school approach — the CIA in Italy, the Soviets in various Western European countries. It still happens. Money gets routed through shell companies, NGOs, cultural organizations. A foreign government finds a sympathetic political movement and quietly bankrolls it.
The fourth — cyber operations beyond social media.
This is where it gets technically sophisticated. Hacking campaign databases to steal internal strategy documents. Leaking those documents at strategically damaging moments. Disrupting voter registration systems. In October 2020, just weeks before the US presidential election, Iranian cyber actors sent intimidating emails to American voters — registered Democrats in particular — threatening "You will vote for Trump or else." The emails were designed to look like they came from the Proud Boys, a far-right group.
The goal there wasn't to actually intimidate anyone into changing their vote. It was to create chaos and make it look like foreign actors were running wild in the election system.
Right — and to sow distrust. If voters receive a threatening email that appears to come from a domestic extremist group but is actually foreign-originated, who do they blame? The other party's supporters. The system itself. The confusion is the point.
The fifth category — cultural influence through state-funded media.
RT, Sputnik, Press TV — these are outlets that present themselves as independent news organizations but function as arms of their respective governments' foreign policy. RT in particular has been remarkably effective at building an audience among disaffected Western viewers by mixing legitimate journalism with Kremlin talking points. The ratio shifts depending on the topic. When it's a local interest story, it might be ninety percent straight reporting. When it's about NATO or Ukraine, suddenly the editorial line aligns perfectly with Russian state interests.
The genius of that model is that it's not all propaganda. If it were, nobody would watch. You build trust with real journalism, then cash that trust in on the stories that matter to your sponsors.
That's what makes the legitimacy question so thorny. Which brings us to Daniel's third question: is there a meaningful line between legitimate interest and interference?
I'd argue there is, but it's not always bright. Let's try to draw it.
I've been thinking about this in terms of three criteria. Is the goal to inform or to manipulate? A foreign government issuing a public statement about its policy preferences — "we would prefer to work with Candidate A on trade" — that's arguably legitimate diplomatic communication. But running a covert botnet that impersonates domestic citizens to inflame ethnic tensions? That's manipulation, full stop.
The problem is that intent is hard to prove. A lot of these operations are designed precisely to create plausible deniability.
That's why the second criterion matters: transparency. Is the source of the message disclosed? If the Iranian government wants to run ads in Israeli media saying "Vote for the party that will negotiate with us," and those ads are clearly labeled as coming from the Iranian government — that's weird, but it's not covert interference. Israeli voters can evaluate the message knowing who sent it.
The moment you hide the source, you've crossed the line. You're no longer participating in the marketplace of ideas. You're running a con.
Third criterion: reciprocity. Would the interfering power accept the same treatment from the target country? If Iran is running botnets in Israeli elections, would Tehran accept Israeli botnets operating in Iranian elections? The answer is obviously no, which tells you that the actors themselves understand this is hostile behavior.
That reciprocity test is elegant because it doesn't require you to parse anyone's intentions. You just ask: would you tolerate this being done to you? If the answer is no, you already know it's illegitimate.
By all three measures, most state-backed influence campaigns fail spectacularly. The intent is manipulative, the source is hidden, and the perpetrators would never accept reciprocal treatment. So Daniel's instinct is right — any direct covert involvement is inherently problematic.
What about overt involvement? Where's the line there?
I think overt involvement sits in a gray zone that depends heavily on context. When the US State Department issues a statement praising a particular foreign leader's democratic reforms, is that interference? Most people would say no — it's diplomacy. But what if that statement is timed for two days before an election? Now it starts to look like an endorsement designed to sway voters.
The timing changes the character of the act without changing the content.
Same words, different context, different ethical valence. This is why international norms around electoral interference have been so hard to establish. The same action can be legitimate in one context and illegitimate in another, and there's no neutral arbiter to draw the line.
Which brings us to Daniel's white-collar crime analogy. Electoral interference is to regime change what embezzlement is to armed robbery. Both are theft, but one is quiet, deniable, and often operates in a legal gray zone.
The analogy holds up remarkably well. Regime change — whether through invasion, coup, or funding an insurgency — is overt, violent, and unambiguous. Everyone knows what happened. Electoral interference achieves similar destabilizing effects without the violence, without the clear attribution, and often without triggering any meaningful response.
Just like white-collar crime, the damage can be enormous even though it's less visible. Look at Kenya in 2007 and 2008. The post-election violence killed over eleven hundred people and displaced hundreds of thousands. Foreign disinformation — including from external actors amplifying ethnic divisions — played a real role in inflaming those tensions. That's not a clean, bloodless operation.
The Kenya case is a sobering reminder that "soft" interference can have hard consequences. When you systematically convince one ethnic group that another group is stealing the election, you're not just influencing an outcome. You're priming a conflict.
The white-collar framing is useful, but we shouldn't let the metaphor sanitize what we're actually talking about. Embezzlement can destroy lives just as thoroughly as armed robbery. Sometimes more so, because it takes longer to detect and the victims often don't realize they've been victimized.
That's the insidious thing about electoral interference. The victims — voters — often have no idea they've been manipulated. They think their outrage is authentic. They think the divisive content they're sharing came from a real fellow citizen. The manipulation works precisely because it's invisible.
Given all this, what can we actually do about it? Let's get practical.
I think there are three levels where action matters. First, for individual voters: develop what I'd call information hygiene habits. Before sharing political content — especially on WhatsApp and Telegram, where botnets thrive — verify the source. Is this coming from a known, credible outlet? Can you cross-check the claim against multiple independent sources? If something is designed to make you furious or terrified, that's exactly when you should pause before hitting forward.
The emotional manipulation test. If a piece of content makes you feel a strong emotion — outrage, fear, contempt — that's a signal to slow down, not speed up.
Botnets and disinformation campaigns are engineered to trigger emotional responses because emotional content spreads faster than factual content. The best defense is a habit of skepticism about your own emotional reactions.
Second level: policymakers.
The Honest Ads Act model in the US — which requires political ads on social media to disclose who paid for them, just like TV and radio ads already had to — that's a baseline. But it needs to go further. Require disclosure of foreign funding for political organizations. Invest in public media literacy campaigns that teach people how to spot coordinated inauthentic behavior. And create real consequences for state actors caught running influence operations — sanctions on individuals, diplomatic consequences, public attribution.
Public attribution is underrated as a deterrent. Part of why these operations work is that they're deniable. If you systematically expose them — name the units, name the officers, publish the techniques — you raise the cost.
The third level: the tech industry. Platforms need to proactively detect and label state-affiliated content, not just react after elections are over. The Iranian botnets in Israel were active for months before detection. That's a failure of monitoring. WhatsApp and Telegram in particular are challenging because of end-to-end encryption, but there are still signals — account creation patterns, forwarding behavior, network analysis — that can flag coordinated inauthentic activity without reading message content.
The encryption tension is real though. You can't have both perfect privacy and perfect detection of malicious activity. There's a trade-off.
There is, and I don't think there's an easy resolution. But I do think the platforms have under-invested in the detection side because the costs of interference fall on society, not on their balance sheets. Until that changes — either through regulation or liability — we'll keep seeing the same patterns.
Even with all those tools, there's one question that keeps me up at night.
What's that?
As AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from real media, how will we even know when interference is happening? The next wave — deepfake candidates, synthetic audio of politicians saying things they never said, entirely fabricated news segments — is already here. And the detection tools are behind the generation tools.
This is the part where my clinical background makes me reach for a diagnostic analogy. Right now, we're treating electoral interference like an infection we can see — the patient has a fever, there's visible inflammation. But AI-generated content is like a virus that evolves faster than our immune system can learn to recognize it. By the time we develop antibodies for one strain, there are ten new variants.
The goal of much of this interference isn't even to change the outcome. It's to make us doubt that any outcome is legitimate. If you can't trust what you see or hear, you can't trust elections. And if you can't trust elections, democracy doesn't work.
That doubt is the real damage. More than any specific candidate winning or losing, the erosion of trust in democratic institutions is the strategic objective. And it's working. Trust in elections has declined across most democracies over the past decade. Some of that is domestic dysfunction, but foreign interference has deliberately accelerated it.
Daniel's framing holds up. This is the white-collar version of regime change — quieter, cheaper, more deniable, and in the long run, potentially more effective at destabilizing a country than a coup or an invasion. You don't need to topple a government if you can convince half the population that the government is illegitimate.
You don't need to win an election if you can make sure the winner can't govern.
There's your episode in two sentences.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In 1909, a French astronomer stationed in Mali observed an unusually vivid red aurora and noted in his journal that the crimson color came from excited oxygen atoms at altitudes above two hundred kilometers — which is why the word "aurora" shares its root with "aurum," the Latin word for gold, even though the red aurora he saw looked nothing like gold at all.
The etymology is wrong but the science is right.
That's somehow perfectly on brand for astronomy in the 1900s.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you enjoyed this episode, tell a friend — and maybe verify that they're a real person and not a botnet before you do. You can find us at my weird prompts dot com or email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com. I'm Herman Poppleberry.
I'm Corn. We'll be back next week.
