Colombia
Introduction
Colombia scored 67 in Freedom House’s 2019 Freedom on the Net report and is considered a
partly free country. Despite this, there are increasing concerns about the growing occurrence
of non-transparent surveillance systems, political violence, and self-censorship.
Disinformation strategies are not a new concern in Colombia. Since 2016, when a referendum
was held regarding the proposed peace deal between the government and the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), disinformation was already in circulation on WhatsApp
(Pablo Medina Uribe, 2018). In the same year, a hacker named Andrés Sepúlveda was arrested
for illegally accessing government information (Watts, 2019). He confessed to multiple crimes,
including hacking and promoting disinformation campaigns in Colombia, as well as many
other Latin American countries.
During the 2018 presidential campaign social media played a significant role as a platform for
propaganda (Freedom House, 2019) and was again used to spread disinformation and
destabilize civil society during the protests of November 2019 (Jakes, 2020). Additionally,
there is evidence of the use of data-driven strategies during the last local elections (Ángel,
2019).
Computational propaganda is not deployed constantly in Colombia, rather it increases during
elections and other polemicized situations. Despite a modest use of bots (Cortés, 2019), it has
been demonstrated that politicians and other high profiles were the most significant actors in
originating and amplifying disinformation (Argüello, s. f.; Freedom House, 2019).
An Overview of Cyber Troop Activity in Colombia
Organizational Form
Some academics attribute the narrow victory of 0.2% for the ‘No’ vote during the 2016 Peace
referendum to disinformation, since polls had predicted ‘Yes’ votes to win by a large margin
(Argüello, s. f.). The referendum was aimed to ratify the final peace deal between the
government and the FARC guerrillas. The then-president Juan Manuel Santos amended the
peace treaty with the FARC and it was approved by Congress. However, there is no further
evidence on the organizational form of any disinformation campaign related to these events.
In addition to this, in 2016 the hacker Andrés Sepúlveda reported that he illegally accessed
confidential documents, trolled, and even coordinated over 30,000 fake accounts on Twitter to
promote disinformation. He has also said that he had been hired by government parties to
promote smear campaigns against the opposition and to generate discontent (Watts, 2019).
During the 2018 presidential campaigns computational propaganda techniques were used in
favour of the different candidates, though there is not sufficient evidence to attribute any
responsibility for such efforts. However, there is evidence that the advertising company
Emotions Media Group promoted content production and digital impulsion on behalf of a party
during the national elections, although the specific party concern has not been identified
(Serrano, 2018).
As LaFM has reported, the following year the Spanish company Eliminalia, which officially
purports to erase internet information and data, was found to be involved in the use of
computational propaganda for five local campaigns, including that of a candidate for Mayor of
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