The campaign was also focused on installing hashtags, such as #BoliviaLibreyDemocratica,
#NoHayGolpeEnBolivia, #EvoEsFraude, and #BoliviaUnida (Organization of American
States, 2019). According to Julián Macías Tovar, these accounts were created within a one
month time frame, with a peak on 11 November. Although it cannot be confirmed that all these
accounts were fake, the researcher Luciano Galup has observed that the username of at least
30,529 of the accounts following Camacho were composed using eight numerical digits, such
as alejand00816798 (Gallagher, 2019).
Graph 1. New Bolivian Twitter accounts created between October 18 and November 20,
2019
Source: Gallagher, 2019
It is worth noting that, according to The Verge, 4,320 fake accounts were part of a campaign
mostly targeted internationally to establish and perpetuate the narrative that a coup d’état had
not occurred. The first identified message that would then be replicated in English and Spanish
was “Friends from everywhere, in Bolivia there was no coup”. Although it is possible that the
original message on Facebook was genuinely written by a student critical of Morales, “the
sentiment was co-opted and amplified by what experts say is a network of automated Twitter
accounts” (Schiffer, 2019). However, there is no evidence of who was behind these
operations.
In addition to this, an analysis by DFRLab of Twitter activity during the 2019 crisis found
copypasta messages disseminated by at least 1,435 bot accounts that countered the coup
narrative. Among these messages, DFRLab identified the above-mentioned “friends from
everywhere, in Bolivia there was no coup.”, along with other messages that were almost
identical and contained the phrases “I denounce to the world…” and “Evo incumplió El Art.
168 de la CPE” (“Evo violated Article 168 of the Constitution”) (DFRLab, 2019). Some of
these messages were posted as images in an attempt to look “as if they were coming from
disparate sources” (DFRLab, 2019).
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