Yeah that's my thought as well.
It's a shocking report (although sadly not surprising), and it's a disgrace they are allowed to operate (if journalists can track them down, the Israeli government should also know where they operate....), but I didn't read anywhere that this was an Israeli State operator.
Sadly, that will now become the focus of this entire thread, rather then the actual content, which is incredibly important and something the Israeli government 100% should be acting on, and should be pressured by other democratic governments to act on.
Yep, agree with those points. Thread needs a title change.
On the topic of fake online avatars. Just personal experience, but I keep seeing more and more of these pop up, both here and on another forum that I use. Both with fairly free signup. At the moment, these posters are often quite easy to spot, because their posts often seem a bit odd and they don't react when questioned. For example, they might bump an old thread just to add "That is very interesting!" or something similar vague. Or recently, I've seen posts that look like a bot took some keywords from the thread title and let chatGPT generate a short text. The post roughly fits the topic, but looks like somebody is completely ignorant of the ongoing discussion.
I was wondering why these posts that seemed to come from bots weren't trying to link to something or selling something, but now I think they simply help to establish an online persona. If you google a fake avatar like that, you get the impression they like football and follow LFC, for example, which helps creating a "realistic" avatar.