Russian bots promoted the now president Gustavo Petro in the 2022 elections and could have influenced his victory, according to the interpretation of some politicians and the media of the Twitter Files. This news is nothing new. In fact, the alleged interference from 2017 to 2021 in the presidential elections and social outbreaks in Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Catalonia had already been suggested. On both occasions, the accusations of the media and political parties have not had sufficient evidence to affirm that there is a direct relationship with the Russian troll farms sponsored by the Kremlin.
These are certainly not accidental. Interference in electoral processes, misinformation or false news, and cyberattacks are some of the forms of information warfare used by Russia around the world. These actions are characterized by the strategic and coordinated use of automated accounts (bots) or fake accounts to manipulate the debate on social networks. The platforms on which these operations have been most common are Facebook and Twitter, which have called them Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB) and Coordinated Harmful Activity, respectively.
Since 2010, Mexico has been the practice epicenter of these operations with Russian bots, which have also allegedly been used in Vietnam, Turkey and the United States. However, experts such as Alberto Escorcia do not directly accuse the Kremlin, but rather the private industry of disinformation or also known as “digital mercenaries” composed mainly, but not exclusively, of digital marketing agencies and hackers who have been hired by political parties and businessmen. Carlos Melo, director of VictoryLab, known, known, as the King of Fake News, has stated that his success in this type of operation is due to the purchase of fake accounts of Russian origin, which he renames in Spanish and uses at his favor to position trends on the internet in an inorganic way.
Russian bots promoted the 2022 elections to President Gustravo Petro
Political polarization and controversy over effective and transparent content moderation on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook is not a phenomenon exclusive to the United States. This time, the information that the owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, has supplied to independent journalists like Matt Taibbi (some classified as Republicans) even to the region.
This journalist published a thread showing how Twitter dealt with requests from political parties and intelligence agencies to moderate or remove certain types of content. These requests reveal, among other things, that the Democratic Party sought to favor and even cover up its own, and the lack of technical evidence from intelligence agencies to request changes to certain user accounts or trends on the platform.
This thread contains a request made by an intelligence agency to monitor hashtags and user accounts from Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia. There are some trends that occurred in the latter such as #PactoHistórico, #PetroPresidentedeColombia2022 or #PetroPresidente2022 and nine Twitter user accounts for probably having inauthentic behavior.
This led to a large number of journalistic articles and publications in Colombia by some opposition politicians, who claimed that there was interference by Russia in the 2022 elections. These assertions are exaggerated, since the information provided by Taibbi suggests that there is not enough evidence to affirm that there was an influence campaign that was directed from the Kremlin. In addition, there is doubt about the scope that these “operations” can have, since only 4% of the population uses this social network.
However, what is true in the suspicions of the intelligence agency? Following only two of the twelve criteria proposed by the Digital Forensic Research Laboratory (DFRLab), of the Atlantic Council, to identify inauthentic behavior in users, that is, suspicious characteristics to be possible bots, it is seen that the suspicions of the agency of intelligence are not unfounded, as some of these accounts have a disproportionate number of posts, and their hours of activity are dubious. Now, to say that they are a threat of Russian origin is an exaggeration. For this, a more in-depth and technical investigation is required, which will be difficult to carry out due to its high economic costs, in order to determine if such a connection exists.
Misinformation in electoral processes is a political risk for the region
The narrative of the Colombian media and politicians focuses their attention on disinformation, as an exclusive problem of false or automated accounts of foreign origin. However, the real threat, according to Camille François, chief information officer at the cybersecurity company Graphika, can be found internally, as happened in the 2016 United States elections. real people like politicians who were nationally elected, who shared their “genuine opinion” and it was inaccurate or false, but it was disseminated as true.
The foregoing minimizes, but does not eliminate, the responsibility that the alleged foreign interference in the elections may have and its ability to determine the national political event. It is worth mentioning that this is not the only connection that may exist with foreigners from the private disinformation industry. In the past, Colombian hacker Andrés Sepúlveda has already warned about how he hired servers located in Russia and Ukraine, in order to spread rumors about leftist or progressive leaders and, thus, end them politically.
Finally, the phenomenon of disinformation in electoral processes is a political risk for the region in 2023. The situation in Colombia is just the beginning, given that the main course has been the elections in Brazil and the coup attempt by the Bolsonaristas, who alleged anticipated electoral fraud. We must be attentive to what may happen in Argentina, Guatemala and Paraguay in this matter, since, although bots do not vote, they do have the ability to synchronize collective thought on social networks and manage to manipulate the digital debate.
*Adjunct professor at the University of La Salle, Colombia.
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