Golden Owl Maps Iran Linked Accounts Posing as Israelis on X
Israel: Golden Owl, an intelligence platform, says it has mapped a coordinated network of accounts on X that used Hebrew language personas to present themselves as Israelis. The company attributes 445 of the accounts to an Iranian influence operation with high or medium high confidence.
The findings appear in the company’s report on Iranian influence against Israeli society. Golden Owl’s wider map covers at least 694 accounts, and the 445 attributed with the strongest confidence form the core of the investigation.
The scale of the activity
According to Golden Owl, posts collected from the network generated at least 4.7 million views and 160,663 interactions between August 11 and October 11, 2026. The company presents these figures as a measure of how much activity the network produced during the two month collection period.
The report places the activity within the political debate ahead of Israel’s 2026 election. Golden Owl describes an effort to join that conversation under identities that looked local, using Hebrew language profiles designed to read as ordinary Israeli voices on X.
Repeated identities and coordination
The report identifies 32 Israeli identities that were each used by two or more accounts. In practice, a single persona appeared across several profiles, which Golden Owl treats as a sign that the accounts were run together rather than independently.
Golden Owl cites several further indicators in support of its assessment of coordination. Accounts were created in batches, identities were duplicated, and the researchers found traces of Persian keyboard use and translation in the activity. Taken together, the company says, these patterns point to a managed network rather than a scattering of unrelated users.
Hebrew names and local sounding profiles are central to the approach the report describes. A familiar name can make an account feel like part of the community, which is why the mapping of repeated identities is a key part of the investigation.
How the confidence levels work
Golden Owl sorts the accounts it mapped into confidence tiers. The figure of at least 694 accounts represents the full map, while the 445 accounts assigned high or medium high confidence form the core group the company attributes to the Iranian operation. The two numbers describe different groups, and the report keeps them apart.
The same care applies to the activity totals. The 4.7 million views and 160,663 interactions are recorded metrics from the collected posts, and the 32 repeated identities describe how personas were reused across accounts. Each figure measures a different part of the operation as Golden Owl documented it.
What the report adds
The investigation adds to a growing body of work on foreign influence efforts aimed at Israeli public debate, and it arrives as political discussion in the country intensifies ahead of the vote. By documenting accounts, identities and timing in a single map, Golden Owl offers researchers and the public a concrete picture of how such a network can be assembled.
The attributions, counts and assessments in this article are those of Golden Owl.
