Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 5 days ago
The disinformation threat has fundamentally shifted. It's no longer just about fake news - it's about fake people and manufacturing fake credibility at an industrial scale, embracing the logic of the tech industry to create a new form of influence no longer used by states but rather pitched by firms. Through years of undercover investigations, including the award-nominated Story Killers project and more recent work based on leaks and published in Haaretz, this session exposes the "Disinformation-as-a-Service" (DaaS) industry; private firms selling software that manufactures synthetic humans designed to manipulate democratic discourse. These aren't crude bots - they're "deep avatars" equipped with years of credibility-building history, real credit cards, verified email accounts and cross-platform presence designed to pass as authentic participants in elections, public health debates and geopolitical conflicts. They echo the work done by states, but in a new format; a software provided as a service though contractors. Drawing on exclusive access to multiple DaaS systems - including Team Jorge's AIMS platform (30,000+ avatars), Percepto International's fake journalism networks and newly documented Israeli state-contracted influence operations, including those against U.S. lawmakers and the Iranian public - this presentation by Omer Benjakob reveals how disinformation has been industrialized following Silicon Valley's software-as-a-service business model. Clients don't just buy lies in a campaign format, they purchase complete deception infrastructure: avatar creation wizards, credibility-building protocols, and deployment dashboards managing coordinated campaigns across continents. Three years after their initial exposure these systems remain active, highlighting a critical regulatory gap that has grown into a chasm with the rise of AI.
The disinformation threat has fundamentally shifted. It's no longer just about fake news - it's about fake people and manufacturing fake credibility at an industrial scale, embracing the logic of the tech industry to create a new form of influence no longer used by states but rather pitched by firms. Through years of undercover investigations, including the award-nominated Story Killers project and more recent work based on leaks and published in Haaretz, this session exposes the "Disinformation-as-a-Service" (DaaS) industry; private firms selling software that manufactures synthetic humans designed to manipulate democratic discourse. These aren't crude bots - they're "deep avatars" equipped with years of credibility-building history, real credit cards, verified email accounts and cross-platform presence designed to pass as authentic participants in elections, public health debates and geopolitical conflicts. They echo the work done by states, but in a new format; a software provided as a service though contractors. Drawing on exclusive access to multiple DaaS systems - including Team Jorge's AIMS platform (30,000+ avatars), Percepto International's fake journalism networks and newly documented Israeli state-contracted influence operations, including those against U.S. lawmakers and the Iranian public - this presentation by Omer Benjakob reveals how disinformation has been industrialized following Silicon Valley's software-as-a-service business model. Clients don't just buy lies in a campaign format, they purchase complete deception infrastructure: avatar creation wizards, credibility-building protocols, and deployment dashboards managing coordinated campaigns across continents. Three years after their initial exposure these systems remain active, highlighting a critical regulatory gap that has grown into a chasm with the rise of AI.
