No, Netanyahu Is Not Dead
Last Thursday, the CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond interrogated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a press conference in Jerusalem. This act of journalism was not unusual, but what happened next was. Diamond uploaded the exchange to social media, and the footage didn’t simply go viral—it became the locus of a mass digital delusion.
The clip racked up millions of impressions across X, Facebook, and Instagram, fueled not by interest in Netanyahu’s words, but by a conviction that the man speaking them didn’t exist. “That is such an obvious composite,” declared one of the most popular replies on X. “How are CNN journalists apparently in on this necromancer-y?!” Countless responses echoed these sentiments. “Netanyahu looks further away than he should,” the top comment on Instagram read. “Looks digitally edited.” Diamond’s reporting had been swarmed by a growing global contingent convinced that the Israeli leader is dead—and that everything we see of him today is the product of AI.
“What do you think about these Netanyahu AI videos?” Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in America, asked one of his show’s guests on March 20. “They think he might be dead.” Rogan went on to suggest that a recent clip of Netanyahu visiting a coffee shop was “clearly AI,” and that not only might the prime minister no longer be alive, but that “his brother got killed in a missile strike.” None of this was true, but Rogan was not alone in voicing the suspicions. “Is Benjamin dead?” Ayoub Khan, a member of the British Parliament, asked on March 14. “I suspect he is dead or at least very seriously injured. Yet the media is completely silent on this topic despite the social media meltdown around this topic!”
Famous people being prematurely buried by social media is not new. You’re not really a celebrity unless X has killed you off at least once. Mahmoud Abbas, the 90-year-old president of the Palestinian Authority, has been erroneously declared dead multiple times. What distinguishes the conspiracy theory about Netanyahu’s demise is its durability. Overwhelming audiovisual evidence, including recent videos of him interacting with journalists and ordinary people, shows Netanyahu to be very much alive. Still, the claim persists.
[Read: How doubt became a weapon in Iran]
“It was really kind of extraordinary,” Diamond told me. He had expected that the news conference he attended, which was broadcast live by various networks, “would kind of put it to bed, but obviously not.”
After Netanyahu posted the clip from the coffee shop, internet sleuths insisted that the beverage in the prime minister’s cup should have spilled based on how he was holding it. Netanyahu then posted a video of himself chatting with Israelis and encouraging them to follow the official safety guidelines for Iranian missile strikes; the digital detectives claimed that Netanyahu’s wedding ring disappeared in the middle of the clip. Mehdi Hasan, the founder of the left-wing media company Zeteo, commented: “I don’t want to be the conspiracy theory guy, and I swear I have resisted all the ‘Netanyahu is dead’ stuff… but this looks so fake.”
Days later, interviewing Senator Chris Van Hollen, Hasan winkingly asked him “a question the entire internet is dying to hear the answer on: Is Benjamin Netanyahu dead?” (An incredulous Van Hollen said no.) The video of that conversation now has more than 800,000 views on YouTube, outstripping most of the other content on Hasan’s Zeteo channel.
On March 16, just four days after Netanyahu’s most recent press conference, The New York Times contributing opinion writer Megan Stack pleaded, “Netanyahu, if you’re there, give a press conference or interview—the timeline has gotten unbearable,” adding that she thought he was “hiding out.” According to one outside analysis, from February 28 to March 19, the claim that Netanyahu was dead appeared in some “800,000 posts from more than 213,000 unique users, accumulating more than 430 million impressions on X.”
The Netanyahu conspiracy theory, and its seeming imperviousness to evidence, is the by-product of a corrupted information environment. In a world where AI can credibly simulate any possible image, people understandably begin to doubt even the images that are real.
This crisis was anticipated. In 2018, the legal scholars Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron warned that machine learning—and the convincing fakes it produces—would undermine people’s ability to identify fabrications. But they also cautioned about something they called “the liar’s dividend”: a situation in which pervasive fakery would allow propagandists to delegitimize reality itself. “A skeptical public will be primed to doubt the authenticity of real audio and video evidence,” the scholars wrote. “This skepticism can be invoked just as well against authentic as against adulterated content.” The unkillable myth of Netanyahu’s death is the liar’s dividend made manifest.
Of course, AI is not the only culprit here. Monetized algorithmic social media provides the perfect breeding ground for self-sustaining falsehoods. Journalists and traditional media outlets, for all their flaws, have editorial processes and professional incentives in place to point them toward reporting the truth. On social media, however, the currency is not accuracy but virality. If something spreads, it sells—literally, as posters are often paid based on engagement.
A conflict such as the U.S.-Israel-Iran war, which inflames millions of partisans, provides a ready-made audience for unscrupulous manipulators. Pro-Iran posters can churn out deepfakes of Tel Aviv being reduced to rubble or Netanyahu being bombed; pro-Israel posters can produce fraudulent images of Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, maimed in a hospital bed. The more people get their news from social media rather than traditional media, the more people will be prone to believe such propaganda—not because it is convincing, but because they want it to be true. This impulse to inhabit a digital dream world, rather than face the broken one that actually exists, is the engine that keeps delusions like the “death of Netanyahu” running.
[Read: The internet is worse than a brainwashing machine]
After all, there are plenty of prosaic explanations for the various oddities raised by those pushing the nonsense that Netanyahu is dead. The Israeli leader’s facial coloring sometimes looks artificial because he famously wears heavy makeup in public appearances. The edges of Netanyahu’s hands in some of his man-on-the-street videos look blurred not because he is digitally rendered, but because the video is, resulting in an array of artifacts caused by compression and the iPhone’s autofocus and anti-aliasing features. Of the two Israeli flags behind Netanyahu during his press conferences, only one is visible from the diagonal side-shot on TV, not because the other has disappeared, but because that’s how camera angles and perspective work. Netanyahu’s son Yair did not go offline to sit shiva and mourn for his father; he recently flew to Hungary to address a conservative conference in support of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s reelection campaign.
Netanyahu himself has appeared in public numerous times, conversing on video with everyday Israelis and international reporters—not just CNN’s Diamond, but Fox’s Trey Yingst and ABC’s Tom Burridge. Netanyahu even posted a video mocking his doubters alongside U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. That all of these people are in on the same elaborate ruse would seem unlikely.
But reasoned refutations miss the point. Many people hate Netanyahu and wish he were dead. Monetized algorithmic social media allows mercenary opportunists to give these people what they want. The spread of this content enriches those peddling the falsehoods—who accrue followers and engagement dollars—but impoverishes the people they fool by making it harder for them to understand the world around them and act effectively to change it.
Intelligent political agency is impossible without a foundation of fact. Yet the rise of unrestrained AI, combined with the incentives and biases that drive social media, has served to supplant facts with consequential delusions, and helped mass-market them to the very people most inclined to believe them. Seen in this light, the embrace of Netanyahu’s mythical death isn’t a bizarre outlier, an eccentricity of the overly online; it is a preview of a new normal.