From six fingers to body doubles, AI is fuelling a new era where distrust spreads faster than truth, writes Tom Tanuki.
WHEN I HEARD about Benjamin Netanyahu’s six fingers, I thought of Tom Hanks.
I refer to a brief segment of a video in which genocidaire Netanyahu is attempting to prove to the public that he is still alive and not yet, more’s the pity, burning in hell. The video was a response to wildfire online rumours that either he or his son Yair Netanyahu had been killed in a targeted Iranian drone strike.
The rumour mill shifted immediately to pick apart the video. Didn’t Netanyahu have six fingers in it, for just a moment? Didn’t he tilt his cup of coffee sideways enough for it to spill but, physics be damned, not a drop fell out? Didn’t he take a big swig from that cup, only for it to remain completely full?
Much of the influencer-led rumour-mongering took the form of wondering whether the Netanyahu video was AI-generated. A brief display of six fingers is a known giveaway par excellence of current-generation AI lookalike slop. It’s a perfectly reasonable doubt that any self-aware internet user is forced to feel about all information or media they see online. (Chances are it’s all slop, made and distributed by bots for a dead internet.)
But the other suspicion I saw among the comments sections was that it was a body-double Netanyahu. And that’s what got me thinking about Tom Hanks. Which reminded me of Jim Carrey, too, as it happens:
I was struck by the ubiquity of recent discussions about whether Carrey, who was in Paris to collect a lifetime achievement award at the Cesar Awards, had been replaced by a body-double because his face looked a bit different, which has never ever happened to anyone in Hollywood before.
A very normal colleague at my workplace mentioned it. Half-decent, boring people I’ve known all my life were talking about it. For a while, your mum, your accountant and your dog all genuinely thought that Ace Ventura, Pet Detective had been replaced by a body-double because he had been 'exposing the paedophile elites’.
Back in 2018, you knew where you stood with these body-double conspiracies. You stood way out on the fringe. And your mum knew nothing about it, unless you told her and watched her eyes glaze over.
The first time I encountered a body-double conspiracy was with respect to Tom Hanks, and it was in the context of QAnon, that most badly-written of late-2010s spy fantasies involving Adrenochrome, Satanic elites and kidnapped children.
Back then, QAnon celebrity conspiracies were different: liberal celebrities were still part of an elite Cabal being punished in secret by Trump and his allies for their crimes against children, rather than outlier Hollywood rebels defying said elite only to be killed off for ita la Carrey. (The dynamics have flipped because in 2026, celebrities appear less as a united progressive front. And Donald Trump, post-Epstein Files, looks like a card-carrying Cabal member himself.)
The theory back then was that the real Hanks had been secretly court-martialled, put on trial and executed for being a Satanic paedophile. The Cabal had scrambled to hide this fact by posting a body-double in Hanks’ stead.
Back when these ideas were situated on the far political fringe of the internet, one still felt somewhat intrepid for managing to familiarise oneself with them at all. I had a lot of fun creating an Australian perspective on QAnon’s extended universe of conspiracies and terminally online ‘digital soldiers’ when I covered it for a two-part documentary on YouTube.
I shared expertise and academic work which contemplated the psychology of conspiracy theories. I discussed how conspiracists don’t necessarily work to expose real-world power conspiracies, but they do often tap into latent anxieties driven by real, parallel abuses of power.
For example, Australian unwittingly helped give life to Fiona Barnett and her elite Satanic paedophile conspiracy theories during a time of collective horror at the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse in Australian institutions that had been taking place here in 2014.
Likewise, late-2010s QAnon theories were given a shot in the arm by Julie K Brown’s 2018 investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. It’s not that QAnon uncovered anything remotely like that, or even dealt in anything but a grim fantasy. But it gained power from an apparent proximity to real monsters like Epstein.
QAnon adherents were famously isolated by a fringe conspiracist network meant to exploit their feelings of powerlessness and paranoia in order to deploy them as ‘digital soldiers’ for political purposes. Nowadays, I wonder if the QAnon ‘digital soldier’ was a test case for the enthusiastic, motivated folk of all stripes that flood the internet from all political angles, directed here and there by an army of hyper-partisan influencers, convinced that everyone is a body-double. Carrey. Hanks. Netanyahu.
The paedophile President just flooded the internet with millions of documents exposing thousands of random celebrity, politician and victim names to the chaotic scrutiny of these masses in the form of the ‘Epstein Files’.
Julie K Brown, without whom we would likely never have known Jeffrey Epstein’s name, said of these ‘Files’ to the New Yorker:
“Well, I wish I could say it was somewhat satisfying to finally see some truth in this, but the way that this is being handled right now by the Administration is very chaotic and messy. […] So I think in some ways this raises more questions and makes the public more distrustful. It was supposed to be an act of transparency. And I don’t see it as that, quite frankly.”
The decision (made under apparent extreme internal pressures) appears to have been a gamble that has paid off. Now millions of documents are being fed at random to the public by their favourite partisan influencer, directing them to brigade whoever their chosen political opponents are. They all look like digital soldiers to me.
I’ve heard the line uttered a lot over the past couple of months that the Epstein Files must ‘prove’ QAnon was ‘right all along’. This tells me these folk knew anything what QAnon was about, nor what Epstein was actually doing. But in our heightened climate of distrust, it’s true that more than ever, conspiracies flourish.
What latent anxieties does the Netanyahu video tap into to be instantly discounted as a body-double or an AI video? Nevermind that any video can now be effective AI-generated disinformation, and often is; now it’s impossible to trust our information feed at the best of times. AI slop has made us more distrustful, more paranoid and more conspiracist.
Set that aside. Let’s acknowledge that Netanyahu is a head of state who has led a decades-long campaign of colonisation, ethnic cleansing and displacement on an Indigenous people that has now culminated in several years of publicly-conducted genocide. The genocide is backed and funded by all our own heads of state across the West.
Most of us believe he ought to have been arrested, tried and executed as a war criminal by now during one of his trips overseas. That he ought to have been stopped by his Western financiers.
We have seen all this destruction play out, and we have not been able to stop it in our masses and our millions. Now we watch him gloat on social media that he is not dead. And our governments lend him our support.
The deep anxieties and fundamental distrust that this barbaric state of affairs has fuelled among the global working class was clearly always going to mainstream rampant conspiracism. It’s hard not to act as a digital soldier in this lawless world while we watch the last remaining rules of international law get swept aside.
And after all, it’s not at all unreasonable to have wished that Benjamin Netanyahu was dead. It’s actually a moral obligation to do so. I can think of few people on Earth more deserving.
Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter/X @tom_tanuki.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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