Juan Orlando Hernández used in his re-election in 2017 fake accounts to manipulate Honduran public opinion. This was discovered when the former president – arrested on drug trafficking charges shortly after leaving office – was a year into his second term. Sophie Zhang, the Facebook data expert who discovered him and was fired for revealing the platform’s careless handling of the incident, identified that thousands of likes, shares and comments in favor of the former president were made by accounts that pretend to be of companies, organizations and public figures. This is yet another example that elections in the region are threatened, not so much by vote buying or corruption, but by the emerging private disinformation industry.
The main customers of these new companies specialized in manipulating the digital ecosystem are the governments of the moment, the aspirants and the political parties. In this way, they deceive voters, shaping the country’s public discourse in their favor, in order to position themselves or remain in power. This phenomenon adds to the alleged threats coming from regimes with autocratic practices such as China, Russia and Iran, which, together with hackers from Venezuela, carry out operations to destabilize certain democracies in the region.
But with the emergence of non-state actors in the production of disinformation, the picture becomes significantly more complex, since finding fault with the political parties and governments that hire these companies depends on loyalty according to the payment for these services.
This misinformation market was exposed by the Oxford Internet Institute in its report “Industrialized Disinformation 2021”. It insists that the manipulation of social networks is a serious threat to contemporary democracies. One of its most worrying conclusions is the growing activity of cyber troops, which are produced by private companies that have been hired by governments or political parties with the aim of disseminating political disinformation through platforms to affect their opponents.
Cyber troops in Latin America?
Of the 81 countries analyzed in the report, 12 are Latin Americans – Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Venezuela – and have been victims of disinformation operations by cyber troops during periods elections and/or transitions of power. The ideological spectrum to distinguish the contractors is irrelevant, as the report includes politicians from both the left and the right who have had ties to these types of companies for the purpose of being in power.
Tactics commonly used by private companies to misinform are narrative laundering or narrative whitening and the use of cyber troops. The first modality consists of developing a narrative from within the government, for which a foreign strategic communication company is hired, which creates websites that simulate being virtual centers of reflection that are characterized by manufacturing people.
These fake profiles are supposedly renowned authors who publish messages in favor of the contracting party with the aim of making them viral until they are captured by the media to be reproduced in private audiences.
This tactic has not yet been fully verified in Latin America, while cyber troops have been used by politicians in the region. These companies usually have hackers or programmers on their payroll who offer to run a variety of fake accounts to disperse misinformation. These include sock puppet accounts, trolls or puppet user accounts. These profiles modify their online behavior according to the client’s requirements, whether to praise, defend, attack or support a politician or organization, and with that they manipulate public opinion.
The Election Hacker in Latin America
According to the infamous Colombian hacker Andrés Sepúlveda, he worked with political consultant JJ Rendón in the presidential elections of Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, Colombia, Costa Rica, Venezuela, among other countries, carrying out disinformation operations through anonymously hired servers in Russia and Ukraine and paid with bitcoins. These operations were characterized by the dissemination of propaganda and political rumours, infiltrating the campaigns of opposition leaders, especially those on the left or progressives, with the aim of burying them socially and politically.
For US firm CLS Strategies, Facebook closed 55 accounts, 42 pages and 36 Instagram accounts centered on Bolivia and Venezuela for interfering in the domestic politics of countries with leftist governments. According to the Stanford Internet Observatory: Bolivarian Factions: Facebook Takes Down Inauthentic Assets (2020) report, the Bolivia-centric accounts supported interim President Jeanine Áñez and accused Evo Morales of electoral fraud, but without further evidence. Regarding Venezuela, this company focused on supporting opposition leaders such as Juan Guaidó, who went viral by managing their social networks from Washington, particularly when he declared himself the legitimate president of this country.
New threats to democracy
This is a year of presidential elections and referendums in the region. Countries like Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico and Brazil, which were previously affected by disinformation campaigns carried out by private companies, are again in the eye of the hurricane, as any political actor can hire these services.
The diversification and sophistication that was developed to disperse disinformation with deep fakes – images and videos created from artificial intelligence – and the automation of bots increasingly similar to human behavior, undermine the legitimacy of contemporary democracies.
In this context, while civil society works on initiatives such as fact-checking to mitigate fake news, disinformation and propaganda, this is not enough to limit their harmful effect on public debate and democracy.
