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 80

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