Latin America is well known for the intensity and sometimes instability of its politics. In the 20th century, military coups and counter-coups became a fact of life, not helped by the widely recognised interventions of the United States.
In recent years, political contestation has married with social media disinformation to create a growing conundrum for electoral authorities and social media regulators alike. The election in Venezuela to be held on July 28th is a particular cause for concern.
The Brazilian and Mexican elections of October 2022 and June 2024 respectively serve as fair warning of the corrosive effect that the spreading of disinformation via fake accounts pretending to be real people can have on national politics.
In Venezuela, this has become the resort of the country’s opposition, out of power for decades and looking to blunt the incumbent government’s momentum in the final weeks of the campaign.
The countries are different, but the tools of disinformation are often the same. Research by specialists at Exeter University found that social media during the Brazilian election was beset by highly unusual, coordinated behaviour.
As many as 20,000 accounts joined Twitter (now X) on certain days, an abnormal sign-up rate indicating that bad actors were flooding the platform with new bot accounts to influence the political debate.
What the researchers termed ‘super prolific accounts’ were recorded generating 100,000 posts per day. Unless the account holders spent their time doing nothing else, this proves that AI programmes were being used to spam the platform with political propaganda.
There were also extraordinary surges in activity on key days of the campaign, such as election day and during the right-wing insurrection of January 8th, 2023. Indeed, some bot accounts proved able to break Twitter’s generous 2.4k limit on unique daily Tweets.
As mentioned, the Venezuelan election is currently seeing similar levels of bot activity. Independent researchers have discovered networks of thousands of fraudulent accounts that coordinate to pump out pro-opposition, anti-government messages.
For example, Edmundo González Urrutia, the main opposition candidate, is lauded by bot accounts using auto-generated names. The accounts are anonymous – unattached with personal photos – and leave favourable comments on the posts of opposition candidates. Pro-government spokespeople or candidates are met with opprobrium and criticism in the harshest terms.
Fake accounts like that of ‘@WilmerC5284412’ are a classic case. The account was created in August 2021 but has been largely dormant, at least until the run-up to this month’s election. At that point, the account holder seems to have sprung into action, repetitively posting endorsements of opposition figures.
Like the vast majority of fraudulent bots, this account has neither a profile photo nor a larger cover photo, both of which might indicate that it was a real person – rather than a tool of disinformation.
It would be a mistake to think these efforts, while often amateurish, cannot have a grave impact on democracy. Mexico’s president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum won June’s election handsomely, but only because her campaign expertly navigated a slew of online attacks that threatened to derail her candidacy.
Coordinated hostile social media efforts saw armies of newly created, anonymous bot accounts group together to attack Sheinbaum on issues as varied (and as deplorable) as her appearance and Jewish heritage. Most notably, bots pushed a narrative that Sheinbaum was born in Eastern Europe – a deliberate ‘dog whistle’ to prejudiced voters that she was not a ‘real Mexican’.
Expecting to face such tactics, Sheinbaum’s team deserve great credit for reacting quickly and effectively, publishing her birth certificate to prove she was born in Mexico City. They also issued warnings, which clearly worked in soothing concerns, in response to a ‘deepfake’ video of Sheinbaum asking voters to invest in a pyramid scheme.
It would be unsurprising if similar deepfake tactics presented themselves in the days before Venezuela votes. The government will certainly be wary and will have to respond quickly if it wants to maintain its current lead in the polls. More broadly, social media users in all countries with elections this year should be aware that domestic issues and narratives can be cynically manipulated for political gain.
Remember: if an account is anonymous with a non-descript name and a handle that looks more like a digital code than the personal selection of a real person, then the account and the content it is sharing or posting should be treated with extreme caution. With this in mind, users will be better able to navigate often treacherous electoral landscapes.