Fake Reporter Petitions Elections Chief Over Arab-Sector Poll and Points at Channel 14 Without Proof

Fake Reporter, a left-leaning NGO, has petitioned Central Elections Committee chair Judge Noam Sohlberg to force disclosure of who ordered and funded an anonymous online poll sent to Arab voters. The messages arrived on September 25 as Arabic-language SMS texts inviting recipients to take an election survey, with a link to ndp.co.il, a site operated by the polling company Next Data. The texts did not say who was behind the poll, who paid for it, or on whose behalf it was sent.

The content is what drew the complaint. One question told respondents that Ra'am had placed Yoav Segalovich, a former head of the police investigations division, second on its list, and asked how that would affect their willingness to vote for the party. A follow-up asked how their vote would change if it turned out Segalovich supports the LGBT community, with answers including "I won't vote for Ra'am," "I'll keep voting for Ra'am" and "I haven't decided." Fake Reporter calls this a push poll: messaging dressed as a survey, aimed at making voters wary of Ra'am under Mansour Abbas, and an attempt, in its words, to distort public opinion and suppress turnout.

Those facts, the SMS, the questions and the petition, are documented. The link to Channel 14 is a different kind of claim. Next Data was founded by the media group that owns the channel. According to a Haaretz investigation, Netanel Siman Tov, the owners' representative, sits on its board, and Ofrim Media, tied to controlling owner Yitzhak Mirilashvili, holds shares. The company also conducts election polls that Channel 14 publishes. That is an ownership trail, not evidence of who commissioned this survey.

The reporting itself says so. Mako, the source of the story, states that at this stage it is not known who ordered or funded the poll, and that the petition does not assign responsibility for distributing it to Channel 14. Yet the headline that carried the story put Channel 14 in the same sentence as the suspicion. The reader who stops at the headline leaves with an accusation the petition never made.

## A petition does the work an investigation has not done

The timing and the mechanism deserve attention. An election-law petition filed in the final stretch before a vote is a powerful instrument: it generates headlines at the moment of maximum sensitivity, and it does so before any ordering party has been identified. If the eventual answer turns out to be an unrelated client, or a campaign with no connection to the channel, the corporate association will already have done its damage. This is interpretation, but it follows a visible pattern, in which right-leaning media are labeled as threats to the electoral process through ownership links rather than proven conduct.

There is also a fair question about consistency. Message-testing and loaded survey questions are not unknown in Israeli campaigns of every camp. The test of whether this is a principled stand against push polling is whether comparable practices by other sides, or by firms tied to other media groups, draw the same petition to the same elections chair. Fake Reporter's record gives readers little reason to assume they would.

None of this means the poll should escape scrutiny. An anonymous SMS campaign aimed at a specific community, with no disclosure of sponsor or funder, is a legitimate matter for the elections committee, and Sohlberg can demand answers from whoever stands behind it. If the poll was ordered by a party or an outlet and deliberately hidden, that should be established and stated plainly. But the order matters: first the facts about who ordered and paid, then the attribution. Right now the petition asks for the first, and the coverage is already supplying the second.