AI OSINT platform Golden Owl maps Iran-linked Israeli election influence network

TLDR

• Golden Owl, an AI-powered OSINT platform, mapped an Iran-linked influence campaign targeting Israel's October 27 election.
• Researchers analyzed 21,533 posts, flagged 1,516 for anomalies, and traced a network of 119,717 accounts with nearly 295,000 relationships between them.
• Several personas built fake Israeli identities using borrowed or AI-generated photos, including one account that switched overnight from arguing Iranian politics in Persian to posting pro-opposition content in Hebrew.
• X's own transparency data placed some "Israeli" accounts as connecting from Germany, Finland, Egypt, or Yemen, and several accessed the platform through what X labels the "Iran Android App."

Golden Owl's investigation ran in two phases between August 22 and September 22, starting with 237 accounts flagged as suspicious and 57 tied to a foreign influence campaign, then expanding into a full network map.¹ The platform also found dark-web sellers offering Israeli-registered Telegram sessions, election databases, and a claimed "Facebook database of four million Israelis."¹

The clearest single case is an account calling itself "Yaara Shalev," the network's most-viewed node, with one post reaching 688,434 views calling for mass emigration from Israel.¹ It was created in 2012, changed its username in 2025, and its profile photos trace to a mix of a circulated adult-film performer's images and AI-generated faces, even though X lists the account's region as North America.¹ Another, "mardeankabooti," posted only in Persian arguing about Ayatollah Khamenei until April 2026, then re-emerged in August as "Alon Strauss," an apparently Israeli, Hebrew-posting critic of Prime Minister Netanyahu.¹

Why it matters: Golden Owl's method, cross-referencing X's own geolocation and app-build metadata against each account's claimed identity and posting history, is a template for catching influence operations before they scale, and it lands nine weeks ahead of an election the platform says Iran is actively trying to shape.¹

Driving the news:

• Some flagged accounts pre-emptively claimed the election would be postponed over "foreign interference," a talking point that spiked on September 20 and was reposted within minutes across multiple accounts in the network.¹
• Israel's Supreme Court separately ruled to ban parties from transmitting real-time voter data on election day, a decision the network seized on around September 17.¹