Politics in Latin America has always been rough-edged, combative, and passionate. It would therefore be a mistake to entirely blame the spread of social media and new emerging communications technologies for the observed increase in partisanship, political violence, and use of hate speech. A wide number of other deeply rooted and structural factors are clearly involved, including inequality, poverty, crime, corruption, and political systems which do not adequately represent the population. That said, it is also evident that some of the more negative aspects of political behaviour have become more harmful, precisely because there is now a bigger and more comprehensive toolkit for disinformation. In short, the new technologies may be allowing what used to be fairly small-scale and localised dirty tricks to become much more widely effective.
It is also clear that a new generation of political strategists and campaign advisers has emerged, selling their services as masters of disinformation. A series of investigative reports by media outlets that form part of the Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP) has offered a tantalising glimpse into the way these people work. A key figure is an Argentine consultant called Francisco Cerimodo who, as we have seen, played a big part in attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the 2022 Brazilian election. However, according to Chilean online news outlet La Bot, Cerimodo and an associated consultancy, Numen Spa, also played an active but low-profile role in Chilean politics.
Cerimodo’s first intervention in Chile was a complete failure. He sought to influence the October 2020 referendum, when Chileans were asked whether they wanted a new constitution to be written (apruebo) or for no change to be made (rechazo). While most opinion polls were correctly predicting around 70% support for apruebo, Numen claimed that, using a supposedly much larger online sample, it had established support for apruebo was much weaker, at only 42%. In addition, it argued that if those planning to abstain could be convinced to get out and to vote, rechazo could win. Right-wing leaders of the rechazo campaign later admitted that they had funded the survey and that it was primarily used for disinformation purposes, to manipulate public opinion. Cerimodo later dismissed it as “a sampling error, serious, but still an error”.
Cerimodo also played a part in the September 2022 referendum when voters were asked whether to approve a progressive constitution written by a constituent assembly dominated by left wingers and independents. By that time opinion in the country had genuinely shifted back towards the right and the new constitution was rejected by 62% of voters. Cerimodo was nevertheless identified as mounting dirty tricks to support the ‘No’ vote. In a published interview with Argentine newspaper La Nación he denied using disinformation but admitted to creating thousands of automatic accounts (in other words, bots) on social media to position political messages in both Chile and Argentina. He added that he had “thousands of trolls” and that he waited 3-4 months between creating and activating them, to avoid algorithms used by Big Tech companies to purge them.
In the 2022 Chilean referendum campaign, Cerimodo promoted the unfounded scare story that the new constitution would limit property rights and prohibit private home ownership. In fact, the text of the constitutional draft recognised the right to “dignified” housing, a new right compared to the existing constitution. But the leaflet, written by an until-then unknown group called Constitutional Facilitators claimed the state would itself own housing for rental, with private ownership in effect suppressed by politicians. Fact-checking groups said this was a complete distortion. Ownership of the Constitutional Facilitators web domain was traced back to Cerimodo, although he claimed he used it for commercial hosting and support and was not involved in the content.
A different disinformation technique appears to have been used by a Mexican citizen, César Hernández, using a company called Neurona, and a series of websites calling themselves Revolución 3.0. Hernández has been closely linked to leading members of Mexico’s ruling left-wing party, the Movimiento de Renovación Nacional (Morena) and to other left-wing groups mainly in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. The status of this particular fake-news network is however currently somewhat unclear, with its activity and web presence dipping since 2015 when Hernández faced court investigations over alleged misuse of public funds in Spain, Bolivia, and Ecuador. In an apparent acknowledgement of this, in May 2023 Hernández told a journalist “We are Plan B now”.
According to an investigation by Mexico’s Animal Político news portal and the anti-corruption lobby group Mexicanos Contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad (MCCI), in his hey-day Hernández controlled at least 116 web domains in different countries, of which 31 claimed to be news portals but behave in an “inauthentic manner”. These sites were often inactive, but rapidly came into play during election campaigns. Using strident headlines and vivid images they copied and pasted plagiarised news stories from other sites, selected to support left-wing causes and attack the right, while trying to appear unrelated. They also appear to have bought advertising space. Facebook owner Meta has described such activity as “coordinated inauthentic operations”. Typically, Neurona was involved in promoting Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla, the Morena governor of Michoacán state, while running negative stories about his predecessor and political opponent, Silvano Auereoles of the Partido de La Revolución Democática (PRD).
Rossana Reguillo, director of digital research at Signa Lab at ITESO, the Jesuit University of Guadalajara, described the approach used as an attempt to create an “echo chamber”, adding: “People get trapped in these dynamics or in these portals that are characterized by the use of strident colours, words in capital letters, bold adjectives. All this undermines the health of public debate and, of course, generates levels of hatred and distrust.” In 2017 Neurona staff used trolls to create content and hashtags attacking Guillermo Lasso, then a right-wing Ecuadorean presidential candidate. These claimed he was preparing a “shock tax package” that would increase income tax by 129%. That was untrue. A proposal for higher income tax had in fact been made, but not by Lasso: it was a recommendation to all candidates proposed by the Ecuadorean Chamber of Commerce.
Another disinformation practitioner has been identified as a Brazilian citizen, André Golabek, who operates through Venquis, a political consultancy active in various countries, and has been involved in creating troll farms to promote ‘Bolivarian’ politicians in Venezuela, as well as backing a spectrum of left-wingers in Bolivia, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. The company appears to be supporting José Gabriel Carrizo, Panama’s vice-president, who is running in the 2024 presidential race in his country. An investigation by media research group Cazadores de Fake News in 2021 found that at least 187 Twitter (later X) accounts were involved in coordinated posting and inauthentic behaviour to back specific candidates or raise associated issues in Venezuela’s regional elections held that year. The number was later increased to 357.
Cazadores built up an infographic where each dot represented a Twitter account, and each line indicated where one account was ‘following’ another. The result was also colour-coded to represent the type of content each troll was primarily posting. The magenta cluster for example, contained largely false opposition or impostor posts, designed to embarrass anti-government candidates. The yellow cluster posted information to support government-backed candidate Jorge Arreaza in Barinas state, and the red cluster backed Héctor Rodríguez in Miranda. These accounts also contained material attacking opposition candidate Freddy Superlano in Barinas and supporting government-backed financier Alex Saab (facing money laundering charges in the US). There was also content relating to the Miss Venezuela beauty competition, perhaps for clickbait reasons.
The Bolivarian troll farm
Source: Cazadores
Significantly the troll accounts also strongly urged followers to find and download a government app, known as VenApp. In May 2022, President Nicolás Maduro unveiled VenApp, which he said was an application built by Venezuelan computer engineers and intended to allow citizens to report public service and utility breakdowns, as well as generally increasing the efficiency of e-government. However, according to Cazadores, the app had in reality been built by companies connected to Venquis and Golabek, using programmers in Panama and the Dominican Republic.
In Cazadores’ view, the app has the capacity to gather sensitive personal information (including identity documents numbers, geo-location coordinates, addresses, emails, and telephone numbers) all of which could be used to influence future electoral campaigning and outcomes. It comments “access to high volumes of personal data collected by VenApp could allow the Venezuelan government to microsegment the electorate, breaking it down into smaller groups to which personalised messages could be sent in future election campaigns, tailored to their interests, concerns and needs”. This approach sounds similar the Cambridge Analytica story mentioned earlier in this report.
Source: First Draft News