The Meta company, owner of Facebook, eliminated a “trans-government trolley farm in Nicaragua”, as announced in a monthly report in October, in which he details: “We eliminated a network of 937 Facebook accounts, 140 pages, 24 groups and 363 Instagram accounts in Nicaragua.”
From their accounts, the Orteguistas confirmed last night that they were closing several profiles on Facebook. On Thursday night, the 28th, they revealed that an imprecise and high number of Twitter accounts had been suspended.
Meta reported that the “trolley farm” operated targeting “the national public of that country and She was linked to the Government of Nicaragua and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party. We found a part of this network through our internal investigation on alleged inauthentic behaviors coordinated in the region, and another part, as a result of the review of public reports on part of this activity ”.
The key concept highlighted by Meta is “inauthentic behavior” (CIB), which means that the company detected since 2018 how it began “a coordinated effort to manipulate the public debate in pursuit of a goal strategic strategy where fake accounts are critical to the operation. There are two types of these activities that we are working to stop: 1) coordinated inauthentic behavior in the context of national non-governmental campaigns and 2) coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign or government actor ”.
The intragovernmental “trolley farm” involved Nicaraguan public institutions making a coordinated effort. The Meta report It mentions that it operated in a transversal manner “with several state entities participating in this activity at the same time. It was operated mainly by employees of the Nicaraguan Institute of Telecommunications and Postal Services (TELCOR), working from the postal service headquarters in Managua. Additionally, they managed smaller groups of fake accounts from other government institutions, including the Supreme Court of Justice and the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute (INSS) ”.
The Ortega network executed a strategy using accounts on Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Blogspot and Telegram. “They published positive content about the Government and negative comments about the opposition, using hundreds of false accounts to promote these publications,” refers to the investigation carried out by Luis Fernando Alonso and Ben nimmo, from Meta’s intelligence analyst team.
Ortega accounts suspended
Some Ortega profiles on Twitter claimed on Friday that they had been suspended “thousands” or “two hundred” accounts, and attributed the dismantling of the “trolley farm” to an “attack by the empire” and described the massive suspension of accounts as a ” censorship to create a media siege to the accounts on the left of the continent ”because they say they have also suspended accounts in Venezuela.
However, Twitter and Facebook point to the “inauthentic behavior” of Ortega trolls and the proliferation of fake accounts as the cause of the suspension.
Among the accounts suspended by Twitter in Nicaragua are @ElCuervoNica, @ TPU19J, @nica_rojaynegra and their other backup account @nica_rojaynegraR, @sapitoFSLN, @elcuervoninja, @ QueenMo1204, @JavierM_Monkey, @taniasandinista, among others.
All these profiles have created new profiles since Friday, as they argue: “if they close one of us, we will open a hundred” because “they could not and will not be able to,” in reference to the political story disseminated by the vice president and spokesperson of the regime, Rosario Murillo, and whose words they are broadcast throughout the day by these accounts belonging to the dismantled “trolley farm”.
Some of these accounts and others have suffered suspensions from Twitter several times due to their violent behavior that violates the rules of that social network, as we reported back in the day.
On Facebook and Instagram
Ortega networks also report that the pages Barricada, RedVolución, Atabal, Red de Comunicadores, Adelante Siempre, Nicaragua Linda, El Manifiesto, La Mora Limpia, Molotov Digital, Todos con Daniel and El Zanate were suspended. The Instagram account of Nicaragua Diseña, the fashion platform run by Camila Ortega Murillo, was also terminated. There is intense activity calling for Ortega supporters to follow the new pages created after the suspension of the “trolley farm” on Facebook.
“Using government employees and infrastructure to run a large-scale multi-platform trolley network is an operation that is a particularly worrying trend: this year alone, we have eliminated government-linked CIB networks in Ethiopia, Uganda, Sudan, Thailand and Azerbaijan, ”Meta experts say in their report.
“When we find campaigns that include account groups and pages that seek to mislead people about who they are and what they are doing while trusting fake accounts, we remove both authentic and inauthentic accounts, pages, and groups directly involved in this activity. ”, They point out, and this would explain why some accounts that do not belong to the Ortega network have also been affected.
Meta’s report is consistent with the research we have carried out systematically since December 2018, studying Nicaraguan digital communities on social networks and that we have been evacuating in journalistic format since March 2021 in CONFIDENTIAL to inform the audience about the Nicaraguan public debate through social networks.
One of the revelations of the Meta report is that they detected the sites from which the Ortega accounts have been operating on social networks and how the FSLN has used public institutions for its partisan ends.
The impact on the digital communication strategy that the FSLN was promoting to spread its propaganda is overwhelming. From Meta they report that the dismantling of the Ortega “troll farm” reaches some 585,000 accounts of followers, who followed one or more of these pages. Also to some 74,500 accounts that joined one or more of these groups and about 125,000 accounts that followed one or more of these Instagram accounts. According to Meta, in these years, the accounts spent more than 12,000 dollars in advertising through Facebook.
