From tearful posts with babies and wounded soldiers to attempts to undermine elections – this is how Russian and Chinese influence operators use fake AI-generated images to identify the innocent and target them with dangerous messages
If you've been wandering around Facebook in recent months, you've probably come across tear-jerking posts like "I went out to attack Iran, and when I returned I discovered that my wife had triplets! Give me a like and congratulations!"
These posts are always accompanied by a touching AI-generated image, with happy babies, soldiers on crutches ("I was injured in Gaza, give me a like for support!"), works of art ("I sculpted a giant wooden muffet. They'll lick me!") and so on and so forth. And tens of thousands of people like these posts, write "Amen" and "May God bless you and keep you," and join the groups where the posts are published.
And they don't know that the moment they do this, they fall victim to a Russian or Chinese influence operation, which has already succeeded in ruining the presidential election in another country – and has now shifted its focus to Israel.
But let's start at the beginning. That is, in Romania.
The presidential candidate who came out of nowhere
In December 2024, the Supreme Court in Romania annulled the results of the presidential election.
The annulment of the election is unprecedented in Romania. It has never happened before. The decision was made only after the court was convinced beyond reasonable doubt that external forces had interfered in the election to push the pro-Russian candidate forward, in unethical and illegal ways.
and so it was.
In November 2024, the presidential election was held in Romania. People went to vote throughout the day, went to bed in the evening, and woke up in the morning very, very confused.
"What country did I wake up in?" one young Romanian wrote online, adding, "Who is Calin Georgescu anyway?"
His confusion is understandable. Georgescu was, well, nothing and nobody. He was a former UN bureaucrat who became a Romanian conspiracy theorist, with a declared fondness for totalitarian leaders like Putin and Russian policies. He was barely mentioned in the polls. But on election day, suddenly, he jumped to first place. It's understandable why most Romanians were speechless the next day.
Then they began to try to figure out what had happened. It took only a few days before the government revealed classified intelligence reports that a “foreign entity” had run an entire social media operation to sway public opinion. Foreign agents were playing with the minds and emotions of the novelists on Facebook and TikTok and all the social media platforms prevalent in the country.
And one of their most important weapons was – you probably already guessed it – fake photos with a tear-jerking story. I call them "blackmailers."
Blackmailers – outlines of their character
Blackmails are posts, photos, and videos designed to elicit a strong emotional response from us. Perhaps it is a patriotic response to the sight of a soldier going into battle, or compassion for a soldier who returned from the war with two prosthetic limbs, or outrage at the injustice of a woman giving birth to ten babies without anyone saying "congratulations." Either way, blackmail provokes a response: a like (of love, anger, or any other emoji), a share, or a verbal response to the blackmail.
Oh, and one more thing: the blackmail is clearly fake. In a really demonstrative way. The situations are often far-fetched: do you really believe that a pilot would take a picture with his face bare, for example? And the pictures and videos are clearly produced by artificial intelligence. The soldiers are wearing uniforms that only resemble (at best) the IDF uniform, you can sometimes find six fingers on their hands, the facial features are too perfect and symmetrical, and other problems that every child today can already identify in photos from Megatron.
This, precisely this, is one of the reasons why they do the job so well. Because blackmailers help Russian agents (or any other entity) distinguish between the naive and gullible, and the more experienced and cautious people.
And that's what happened in Romania.
Israeli network researchers who were recently interviewed by Haaretz newspaper Explain that blackmailers appeared on social media in Romania many months before the elections. These blackmailers focused, as expected, on appealing to emotion. They featured graceful Romanian female pilots asking for likes after their first successful flight, grandmothers who had reached the age of 99 and wanted to be blessed, and young couples who had their first triplets of mutant six-fingered babies and wanted to share their joy with the surfers. And the Romanian public went "aww" en masse, sharing and liking and blessing them in the name of Jesus crucified.
The foreign agents behind the operation recorded the names of every person who responded. They invited them to join Facebook groups for mass blessings, and WhatsApp groups of “The Power of Prayer, Faith in Jesus” and other similar names. In these groups, people continued to be exposed to “innocent” extortion, and continued to like and share – thus dragging others into the groups.
Then, shortly before the presidential elections in Romania, the agents began to influence all those good, innocent people. The blackmailers became more politically oriented. They echoed the conspiracies that Georgescu had spread. They were pro-Russian and anti-Western. The handsome, heartthrob pilots became Russian-looking.
The messages themselves were tailored to the groups. More religious groups received pro-Russian messages in devout Christian 'religious' language. Secular groups received messages that appealed more to the heart. Groups of farmers saw blackmailers with messages that were particularly appealing to them. And Georgescu Mentioned and tagged Often in blackmail or in response to it.
Such an operation does not just appear out of nowhere. According to a report by the Romanian Intelligence Service, about 25,000 TikTok accounts were involved in Georgescu’s campaign. It was an influence operation with a huge investment from… someone. No one is sure who, but the clear bet is on the Russians.
The result was that on election day, all those gullible and innocent people were persuaded to run to the polls to vote. In favor of Gheorghescu, of course, who overnight became the leading candidate for the presidency of Romania. This was the point at which the government, the courts, and the Romanian public realized that there was a real threat to the integrity of the elections, and took action. The elections were invalidated due to external interference. And when they were re-run, Gheorghescu was not allowed to run.
And the exact same action took place in recent months in Israel.
The blackmailers are making an aliyah.
In April and May of this year, the blackmailers began arriving in Israel. Here, they operated according to exactly the same pattern that was discovered in Romania: They appeal to traditional, patriotic, and religious audiences. The images are of soldiers and farmers, pilots and babies. The constant call is for likes, shares, and congratulations. And the profiles that publish these blackmailers and manage the pages are usually fake or come from other countries. Some of them have even been involved in previous influence operations, with remnants of texts in Polish and Bulgarian.
Is this an operation that is also trying to influence Israeli public opinion? Probably yes. It is difficult to explain otherwise the similarity to the Romanian influence operation and the involvement of foreign profiles. Are these the Russians? Maybe. Or maybe the Chinese, or the Iranians, or any other entity that likes to cause conflict between citizens in democratic countries. The one thing we can be sure of is that whoever produces and manages the distribution of blackmail does not like Israel. Perhaps in the run-up to the next elections, the blackmail channels would change their face, as happened in Romania, and would promote the candidate most suitable for the Russians, the Chinese, or the Iranians. Perhaps it would be enough for these agents to identify the gullible and innocent in Israeli society, so that they could later approach them and steal money from them, or even gently offer them to spy against Israel.
The agents wouldn't put it that way, of course. But I'm guessing they're not too worried. Anyone naive enough to believe that an Israeli pilot needs likes after giving birth to five babies in flight and still landing the plane safely will probably also fall victim to any other argument the smart intelligence agents come up with.
The blackmailers, to put it simply and bluntly, are a real danger to the security of the state.
The good news is that Facebook has already shut down the groups that are spreading the blackmail, following a request from Haaretz. The bad news is that there is no reason why the foreign agents will not publish new blackmails and continue to try to identify the most innocent and vulnerable people in Israeli society.
אז מה עושים?
How to be anti-blackmail
How can we deal with blackmail? On two levels – personal and social.
On a personal level, each of us needs to be aware of the existence of blackmail and its source. We need to understand that there are 'bad' people trying to influence us in various ways, and look for signs in any post that seems too good, or too bad, or simply one that tries to activate our emotions and turn off our brains. And be very careful not to share such blackmail, or join groups that spread it.
On a social level, we also have a responsibility for others, because in a democracy we all rise or fall together. Do you know that your parents are enthusiastic about such blackmailers? Let them know about the danger and ask them to be more careful. Tell them what happened in Romania, and explain to them that the same thing can happen here in Israel.
And one more important thing: if your relatives and loved ones have already joined the blackmail groups, you and they should know that they are more vulnerable to scams in the coming years. Their names have been added to the private database of Russia / China / Iran, and it is not easy to track down their phone numbers and emails and try to run various kinds of scams on them. Some can expect to receive calls with the Majorette voice of their daughter screaming after an accident, and a doctor demanding money in Bitcoin here and now to treat her. Or that scheming women will contact them and try to blackmail them for crimes they never committed. Or any other trick. They are marked now.
The situation is even worse because the more powerful artificial intelligence becomes, the more it will be able to carry out these scams on its own. Fraudsters will be able to run an engine that will call people on its own, speak in multiple voices, and sound completely natural. They just need to know who to target, and blackmailers – who identify people who are not yet aware of technological advances, and perhaps also particularly naive – can help them with this.
Last but not least, we can take heart from the fact that governments are beginning to understand the magnitude of the threat to democracy. Romania has experienced the consequences firsthand, and now other countries are much more cautious. The government's role will be to protect us from blackmail. But will it be able to do that, or will it try to blackmail us of its own?
We will discover the answer, as usual, in the future.
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