The digital army of the Peruvian left

Over the past few weeks, with the recent purchase of Twitter from Elon Muskwe heard in all the media that one of the first actions of the new owner of the social network is to get rid of the bots and fake accounts, despite the fact that they make up about half of Twitter users. A logical decision, if we intend to fight against disinformation.

This decision immediately leads us to wonder what will happen to all the digital armies What do governments have today to gain influence on social networks? It is well known that many governments resort to so-called “digital armies” to strengthen their communications (or so they assume, since we are talking about inorganic communications), as well as to position issues, controversies and , in many situations, divert attention from situations they don’t want to be the center of attention.

Analyze the special case of PeruAccording to research, it is observed that During Pedro Castillo’s government, he created his own digital structure with thousands of accounts that operated in the country using VPNs and fake names. Even, according to the investigation conducted, now that Castillo has been freed for trying to break the constitutional thread, part of this structure continues with messages in his favor, demanding his release and attacking his successor, To Boluartethat the propaganda that emanates from this army refers to as “the right”, but obviates an elementary objective reality: it was from the Pedro Castillo party, was a candidate from the Pedro Castillo party and was part of the Pedro Castillo government.

Pedro Castillo’s victory had more to do with the impact of the “new” and the “different” than with his presence and his speech. Knowing this precisely, his team, seeking to protect him in some way, created this structure in order to amplify the messages and use it as a force to attack his opponents on social networks. If you divide, you win and also prevent speeches from being analyzed in depth by society.

This army or numerical structure consisted of a few 300 trolls and around 7,000 bots who were responsible for increasing the conversation and hitting Peruvians who were unrelated to Pedro Castillo, whether they were politicians, businessmen, journalists, human rights defenders or leaders social.

The stories intended for this purpose, as the research has shown, were organized according to the theme of the day or the season. They tweeted using hashtags in videos and images edited for context. While some started the conversation, other similar accounts retweeted or replied to the post, making the content go viral. Accounts were also created that were limited only to sharing posts by Castillo or his allies, increasing the metrics.

This digital army was created in the campaign of Pedro Castillo for the presidential elections while his function was to swell the conversation with campaign proposals and attack his then-opponent, Keiko Fujimori. Some of his followers began to embed bots in their posts to appear to better position the then-candidate.

During the campaign, this structure was bounded and limited, but it grew and strengthened exponentially, from a structure of around 2,000 accounts to more than 7,500.

the structure operated from Lima and used servers and resources of public entities.

This army is easy to identify because the accounts they use have few followers (from 0 to 50 followers, only some cases have up to 100). They don’t have a profile picture, or if they do, they’re edits with posts from their own story. They use ambiguous fake usernames and are often just phrases related to leftist ideology. They don’t write about other topics, but all of their content is based on attacking Castillo’s opponents, retweets and, at most, adding generic posts.

Still, it is a powerful structure as it has accumulated over 1 million followers on Twitter alone not counting its influencer accounts, which easily brings its reach to around eight million. It is relatively easy to position messages, attack specific people and groups, and manipulate information if you manage these types of digital “armies”.

This structure is common among left-wing authoritarian governments in the region; especially those from Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia, but there have also been other cases. Recently, declassified Twitter files showed that Russia was funding a large network of bots supporting Gustavo Petro’s presidential campaign in Colombia. Of course, the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes collaborated in this campaign.

How the Historian Developed Anne Applebaum, autocrats banded together in conglomerates with one goal: to retain power. And the use of social networks in recent times has been essential for this purpose since misinformation and post-truth are essential to social control and the division of societies.

If Elon Musk keeps his promise (to crack down on fake Twitter accounts), governments will surely try to move and strengthen their armies on other social networks, which is already happening to some extent. It is essential to fight against disinformation and manipulation of the media because these, in the end, end up attacking democracy itself.

*Walter Molina Galdi, political scientist graduated from the Central University of Venezuela with a specialization in political communication

Continue reading: