What do the 2017 Catalan independence referendum, the 2018 presidential elections in Mexico and the 2019/2021 social protests in Colombia and Chile have in common?
According to governments and the media, Russia has been involved in them, influencing the public debate on social media through “bots” – semi-automated accounts that reproduce certain types of content – with the aim of destabilizing these democracies.
Accusations against Moscow have been frequent since 2012, when they affected the United States in the Syrian war, intensified after the 2016 presidential election, which elected Donald Trump, and consolidated with the infodemia about Covid-19.
These influence campaigns are used with the aim of creating or modifying people’s beliefs about a specific issue, usually favoring a political actor.
For this, it uses a large number of fake social media accounts that are not located in the country where the debate is taking place.
The most emblematic Russian case is that of the “bot farms” of the Internet Research Agency, which, according to experts, have a high degree of coordination to reproduce a given narrative and make it viral.
Such a story is classified as disinformation as it is false information spread with the intention of misleading.
In addition to bot farms, the nature of Russian-funded media such as RT in Spanish or Sputnik Mundo has also been questioned.
These, according to the US Department of State’s Global Engagement Center, have spread political, social and misinformation about Covid in recent years in many parts of the world.
Typically, democratic states fund international media coverage with the aim of portraying a positive outlook from those countries abroad, known as “soft power”.
However, the Russian case is analyzed under the concept of acute power, as the country is questioned for its undemocratic practices, including the founding of such media companies and their use to distract, divide and manipulate internal and external audiences.
The demands made by the governments and media of the respective countries started to be questioned by the academic circle and by the public opinion as they exaggerate the extent of such operations.
Furthermore, they are considered biased, whether due to a lack of conceptual clarity, the origin of the information, the methodology used or the interpretation of the data.
From Cyrillic to Latin alphabet
According to David Alandete, former editor of El País, in the 2017 unilateral referendum on Catalonia’s independence, Russian-funded media were more viral than Spanish, using “bots” to reproduce the pro-independence narrative.
He even suggested the possible support of Venezuelan accounts in this task.
According to Alandete, the pro-Kremlin media emphasized the violence perpetrated by the Spanish police against Catalan voters and activists, but these criticisms are based on self-references, and many of the newspaper’s columns are statements and do not specify the origin of the analyzed accounts or their supposedly disproportionate behavior .
In the 2018 Mexican presidential elections, the Atlantic Council identified in a report the existence of potential commercial “bots” that appear to have Russian origins.
However, that investigation found no evidence that these accounts were financed or coordinated by the government of Vladimir Putin.
The same think tank also analyzed pro-Kremlin media publications covering the election and found clear anti-American bias but no pro-candidate positions.
An article by Lara Jakes in The New York Times revealed possible Russian interference in social media during the social protests of 2019/2020 in Colombia and Chile.
And the Spanish company Alto Analytics suggested the existence of anomalous behavior by a significant number of accounts located abroad.
In Chile, for example, 135 anti-government protests were identified as having been called from abroad, in countries like the United States, Spain and Venezuela, via Facebook.
In Colombia, the pro-Russian media focused on showing the state’s violence against the population.
The most striking finding for both countries was the identification of 175 accounts with possibly semi-automated launch rates, 58% of which were located in Venezuela.
The Global Americans study agrees with the preponderance of coverage of police violence in Colombia by the pro-Kremlin media during the protests, as well as the existence of disproportionate reports that disseminate this type of content.
Regarding their location, a significant number of them were in Venezuela.
And the report published by the Center for a Safe and Free Society detected 7,000 anomalous offshore-operated accounts with servers in Russia and China and identified the geolocation of 4,233 in Bangladesh, 1,500 in Mexico; 900 in Venezuela and 600 in other countries.
Scapegoat in the region?
According to these data, unlike other parts of the world, no disproportionate Russian influence can be demonstrated in Latin America.
What can be identified is anomalous behavior coming from abroad, especially from Venezuela, during social protests and election campaigns.
However, constant monitoring of the Russian media ecosystem in the region by governments and civil society organizations is necessary, as media such as RT in Spanish have a growing audience in countries such as Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina and Colombia.
The questionable accusations from governments and much of the traditional media are also dangerous because they embody in society the idea that foreign influence continues to define national events.
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