Yariv Levin named interim Israeli Prime Minister,

[Huntsvil]

replacing Netanyahu

Just because someone on social media called Netanyahu AI pm doesn’t mean he’s dead/ hiding/ replaced or whatever.
People say all kinds of crap on social media.

No.

Last night was the 19th, OP heard rumours on the 17th.
Yes, this is one that is kind of obviously fake, but it is getting so sophisticated that I think we will alll be fooled at some point by an AI generated image.

It was the most ridiculous rumour from the start.

Netanyahu has not been hiding away. Just wishful thinking from some people.

Or paranoia.

This story reminds me of the rumours about Princess Catherine who was said to have died and been replaced by a lookalike.

Now, this really did gain ground on X - though some of it was maliciously interpreted, for instance it showed the royal couple visiting some place near their home - a sort of outdoorsy shop - and being filmed by someone, a 'close-up' 'revealed' it surely wasn't Kate, but it had been doctored. I think some of this stuff may have been a social experiment carried out to find out how fast gossip can travel, how far misinformation can go.

A Mother's Day picture was picked apart because it has been photoshopped in all kinds of different ways, the main shot of Kate taken from an earlier photoshoot and inserted...

When it emerged she had cancer it was very much a case of 'Oh, okay, we misread that one, we better shut up now'. Which is all very well, but does that mean the photo released of her on Mother's Day hadn't been doctored and photoshopped?

Sometimes I wonder if these rumours aren't spread deliberately to undermine the general public, to get us guessing only to be thoroughly discredited at a later date, a sort of State ruse.

I wouldn't say the rumours were discredited in those instances. People smelt shit because there was shit to smell! She wasn't dead, locked up in a psychiatric hospital etc and we eventually got the truth but it was evident something was going on behind the scenes which proved to be correct.

But instead of just accepting that something might be going on behind closed doors (like sickness, not that farfetched) people had to come up with some batshit stories.

I noticed that too: What was he operated on for a while back? Could he have lost weight through illness?

(FWIW I don't believe he's dead, but even if he were, it's not the same level of significance as the Ayatollah in the Iranian regime - Netanyahu isn't a dictator so his presence at the head of the government doesn't carry the same weight)

If he is dead he's got a damn good lookalike (& soundalike) who spoke at the press conference on Thursday.

Ah, that's a fair point. Nonetheless, while the public were correct to suspect something was wrong with Kate, but just got the wrong end of the stick - anyone who's seen the 1970s Gene Hackman movie The Conversation might see how this can happen - for all that, we had 'footage' of Kate shown as a close-up - but facially the close-up was doctored. Okay, that's mischief. But then we had folk analysing the Mother's Day pic and saying how it had been photoshopped with a shot of Kate being inserted... Now... was that true or was someone having us on? Not sure Kate's chemo made her bald - when she reappeared she had a full head of hair, so why not just take a snap of her and the kids for the event?

My point is, didn't we as the public get played, and if so, to what end? Who benefited?