The American journalist and writer Matthew Taibbi published this week on his Twitter account the 10 Russian profiles used by the left of the Historical Pact to implant a state of negative opinion on social networks, which further polarized the country in the midst of the electoral campaign who elected Gustavo Petro president.
Although it is a strategy that is not new, and that in the case of Colombia is used by all political spectrums, it is consistent with the strategy of crossing the ethical frontier –which was known in the leak of the “petrovideos”– , and adds a seasoning of fear in the West: Russia and its interference in Latin America.
Taibbi analyzed the secret Twitter files declassified by Elon Musk – the new owner of the social network and whose plan is supposedly to promote transparency on the platform – and revealed the role played by Russia in spreading false news to interfere in matters inmates from different countries, including Colombia, according to their political intentions. This Russian novel already had a chapter during the 2016 presidential elections in the United States, when a campaign of memes, insults and false news leaked from Russia that benefited Donald Trump and undermined the image of Hillary Clinton, all through Facebook.
When crossing the information on the activity of the accounts exposed in the declassified files with various Colombian personalities, their behavior, the frequency and volume of their content, the results are surprising. For some analysts, these accounts consolidated an audience on which to implant the idea of a social outbreak with a view to the presidential elections. In some cases, these profiles reached 15 million Twitter users, according to analytics tools, quite a feat in accounts that average around ten thousand followers.
The same analysis tools show that 7,674 users were mentioned, 17,450 trills were made and there was a potential reach of 87,148,250 users. From there, not only were the opponents attacked with half-truths, distorted information, insults and lies –even graphic pieces with montages or in which they were seen to be deformed–, accounts of people who were members of the Historical Pact were also supported, such as the former senator Gustavo Bolívar, the representative Katherine Miranda and the president of the Chamber, David Racero.
However, one of the most named people in this activity was the former ICT minister Karen Abudinen, involved in the Centros Poblados scandal, in which the court found corruption for the award of a $70,000 million contract to bring connectivity to schools rural areas of the country, an object that was not fulfilled and whose contractors even attached false documents.
This case was used in the digital offensive of the Russian accounts analyzed by Taibbi. More than 7,000 contents were generated against Abudinen in a period of no more than 10 days, which produced a mass activity that triggered an environment of opinion against the former official. The case here is that while the act of corruption was pointed out, the candidates of the Historical Pact were presented as the saviors of cases like these.
When analyzing the tone and atmosphere of the contents, it is clear that the purpose was to install in opinion the idea that the one who had appropriated these resources was the former minister Abudinen and not the Temporary Union headed by the convicted Emilio Tapia. At that time, the judicial investigation had not made any discoveries, and today Abudinen defends herself by saying that she expired the contract and exposed the corrupt, although her role in said contract call is yet to be established.
When crossing the data of the accounts implemented to talk about this case during 2022, it is quite evident that they were trying to lead users of social networks to attack the then president Iván Duque. The accounts acted in a coordinated manner against the former president, permanently disqualifying his decisions, inciting a march against his government in the midst of the so-called “social outbreak”, dismissing his actions and those of several of his ministers. In addition, the mockery of the personal image of the ex-president was always present, associating him with animals, attacking his family; Thus thousands of accounts were slowly undermining his image and that of the end of his government in front of public opinion.
Other names analyzed with analytical tools are those of the current presidential candidates facing Gustavo Petro, that is: Rodolfo Hernández and Federico Gutiérrez; the activity against these characters in the middle of the campaign became an invisible war in the eyes of public opinion that generated large volumes of traffic with hostile and humiliating content that spread on the networks as the excitement of the electoral contest grew.
The so-called “petrovideos” revealed in the voice of the digital advisor of the Petro campaign, today consul in Chile, Sebastián Guanumen, an audio in which he exposes part of the bullying strategy deployed by that political campaign.
“The objective of this group is not to do things for the official campaign, but to work the entire defense and attack sideline, and that means that we have to defend and attack. And that means that, surely, the ethical line is going to run a bit, but we cannot not attack or defend ourselves”, Guanumen, who studied Political Science at the University of the Peoples, in Moscow, can be heard saying in the audios. .
It is striking that in the data crossing the name of former senator Gustavo Bolívar appears recurrently, supported by the 10 accounts, permanently recalled by them and sometimes applauded in his offensive trills against officials as if it were a first line, this time digital, of his political activity. In various political circles it is said that Bolívar is an expert in digital warehouses, something that he has persistently denied, assuring that within the Historical Pact there is a lot of collaboration.
Psychiatrist Rodrigo Córdoba, professor and researcher at the Universidad del Rosario, explains how this type of content and digital strategies work to damage the human brain.
Córdoba affirms that these organizations make a kind of “clinical history” of human objectives, analyze them, observe their weaknesses and attack in droves to undermine the self-esteem of people previously installed a negative state of opinion against them.
It is a very sophisticated way, says Córdoba, of turning public opinion into an instrument against institutions in search of achieving high-value objectives that undermine the credibility of these people and, incidentally, of their positions.
The plot consists of creating through social networks an atmosphere of pessimism and disturbance of public order that generates a mass effect that produces chaos and hopelessness. Cases such as the curfew decreed in Bogotá in November 2019 after an escalation of violence that filled the city with panic, the seizure of the country’s prisons at the start of the quarantine due to the pandemic that later became known was fabricated through social networks or the acts of violence reproduced a thousand times that generated instability in the national strike of April 2021 are an example of how through these digital channels the social behavior of the country has been modeled. This time we are not only facing the narratives implanted from social networks, but also globalization with this support from Russia.
Perhaps a closer case is that of Medellín, where the Mayor’s Office has sown various ideas on social networks: that political control is attacks, that the Grupo Empresarial Antioqueño (GEA) was behind the Hidroituango crisis – when not even companies such as Argos, Sura, Nutresa and Bancolombia are in the works– or that the mayor Daniel Quintero fights against corruption, when reality shows dozens of complaints of possible theft from the public treasury. Today politicians play in the field of what academics call post-truth: half-truths or disguised lies.