Standing next to the French Prime Minister on Thursday, a senior leader of the country’s disinformation detection agency Viginum revealed that an Israeli company had run digital influence operations in contests as farflung as the French municipal elections, Scottish parliamentary polls and New York’s mayoral tussle this year. BlackCore, which has described itself as “an elite influence, cyber and technology company built for the modern era of information warfare”, ran coordinated campaigns to influence voters against those who might oppose Israel’s carnage in Gaza and elsewhere, Viginum’s report claimed. They would hardly be the first such influence peddler. However, the question it raises for the world’s largest democracy, which also hosts the largest netizenry, is about the non-partisan steps being taken to guard future elections from such operations.
