As the 2020 U.S. Presidential election heats up, we are seeing increased attention to campaigning, both legal and illegal, on social media. Bots and trolls, hyper-targeted advertising and dark ads all raise sustained concerns about how strategic interventions on social media will affect elections in democratic societies. Israel went through two full election campaigns in 2019, featuring the cutting edge of network propaganda technologies. Justice Hanan Melcer of Israel's Supreme Court chaired Israel's Central Elections Committee during both elections and will speak about his experiences managing the two election cycles and ruling on campaign practices as they unfolded in real-time.
Hanan Melcer is the Deputy Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel. From 1998 to 2002, Justice Melcer served as Senior Lecturer in Administrative Law in the Faculty of Law in the Bar-Ilan University. He has also lectured on Tender Law in the University of Tel Aviv and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and led a seminar on Privatization Law and Liberalization in the Law Faculty of the Tel Aviv University. Justice Melcer was appointed Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel in 2007; he was sworn in as Deputy President on October 30, 2017.