Facebook has allowed the president of Honduras to artificially inflate the appearance of popularity on his posts after the company was first notified.
Honduran activists and scholars say astroturfing – the digital equivalent of a crowd in the bus – was just one facet of a broader online disinformation effort the government used to attack critics and undermine social movements.
Facebook messages by Juan Orlando Hernández, an authoritarian judge whose re-election in 2017 is widely considered fraudulent, have received hundreds of thousands of false preferences from more than a thousand fake Facebook pages – profiles for businesses, organizations and public figures – set up on look like Facebook user accounts.
The campaign was discovered in August 2018 by a Facebook scientist, Sophie Zhang, whose work involved combating false involvement: comments, shares, preferences, and reactions from fake or compromised accounts.
Zhang started researching Hernández’s page because he was the beneficiary of 90% of all the known false involvement received by Civil or Political Pages in Honduras. Over a period of six weeks in 2018, for example, Hernández’s Facebook posts received 59,100 users, of which 46,500 were fake.
She found that one of the administrators of Hernández’s Page was also the administrator of hundreds of unattractive pages that were used only to promote the Hernández page. This individual was also an administrator for the page of Hilda Hernández, the sister of the president, who served until his death in December 2017 as his communications minister.
Although the activity violated Facebook’s policy of ‘coordinated misconduct’ – the kind of fraudulent campaign used by a Russian influence operation during the 2016 US election – Facebook dragged on for almost a year before launching the campaign in July. 2019 has decreased.
Despite this, the campaign to boost Hernández on Facebook has repeatedly returned, and Facebook has shown little appetite for policing the repeat. Guy Rosen, vice president of integrity of Facebook, referred in an internal discussion in December 2019 to the return of the Honduras campaign as a ‘bummer’, but stressed that the company should influence the US or Western Europe prioritize. exported by Russia or Iran.
Hernández’s Page administrator also returned to Facebook despite the ban during the July 201 removal. His report listed his place as the Honduran presidential palace and included photos taken in restricted areas of the president’s offices.
The Page administrator did not respond to inquiries from the Guardian, and his account was removed two days after the Guardian asked Facebook about it.
A Facebook spokesperson, Liz Bourgeois, said: ‘We fundamentally disagree with Ms Zhang’s characterization of our priorities and efforts to eradicate abuse on our platform.
‘We investigated and shared our findings on the removal of this network in Honduras almost two years ago. These investigations take time to understand the full extent of the deceptive activity so that we do not enforce piece by piece and have confidence in our public allocation … As with other CIB removals, we continue to strive for the presence presence rebuild, monitor and block our platform. ”
Facebook declined to comment on the return of Hernández’s Page administrator to the platform. This does not dispute Zhang’s factual allegations about the Honduras case.
Hernández did not respond to inquiries sent to his press officer, attorney and minister of transparency.
Fraudulent social media campaigns are being used to ‘deter political participation or change the minds of those participating’, said Aldo Salgado, co-founder of Citizen Lab Honduras. “They serve to mimic popular support that the government does not have.”
Eugenio Sosa, a professor of sociology at the National Autonomous University of Honduras, said the government’s use of astroturfing to support Hernández “has to do with the deep erosion of legitimacy, the little credibility he has, and the enormous public distrust of what he does, what he says and what he promises. ”In addition to the president’s loyal supporters, however, Sosa said he felt it had little effect on public opinion, due to a steady stream of headlines about Hernández’s corruption and the links with the drug trade.
Hernández’s brother was convicted of drug trafficking in U.S. federal courts in October 2019, and the president himself has been identified by U.S. prosecutors as a co-conspirator in several drug trafficking and corruption cases. Hernández has not been charged with any crime and denies any wrongdoing. Until recently, he was a major American ally in Central America.
Salgado said the Hernández government began relaxing on social media disinformation campaigns in 2015, when a major corruption scandal involving the theft of $ 350 million from the country’s health care and pension system sparked months of torchlight protests. “That’s when the need for government arises and they desperately start creating an army of clashes,” he said.
Facebook, which has about 4.4 million users in Honduras, was a double-edged sword for the non-partisan protest organizers, who used the social network to organize but were also attacked by a disinformation campaign claiming to be led by Manuel Zelaya be controlled. a former president who was ousted in a 2009 coup.
“The smear campaign was psychologically overwhelming,” said Gabriela Blen, a social activist who was one of the leaders of the torchlight processions. ‘It’s not easy to endure so much criticism and so many lies. It affects your family and your loved ones. This is the price paid in such a corrupt country if one tries to fight corruption.
“In Honduras, there are no guarantees for human rights defenders,” she added. “We are at the mercy of the forces that dominate this country. They try to terrorize us and stop our work, either through psychological terror or through campaigns on social networks to incite rejection and hatred. ”
According to Sosa, the sociologist, protest marches are mostly used as violence or partisanship during periods of social unrest. “It scares people away from participating,” he said.
Hernández won a second term in a 2017 election plagued by irregularities. With protests and a violent repression of the country, researchers in Mexico and the US documented the large-scale use of Twitter bot accounts to promote Hernández and project a false view of ‘good news, prosperity and tranquility in Honduras’.
Several protests in 2019 against the government’s efforts to privatize the public education and health systems were again carried out by a digital smear campaign – this time with the support of an Israeli political marketing firm banned from Facebook in May 2019 because it prohibited coordinated unauthorized violation. behavior.
Archimedes Group has set up fake Facebook pages pretending to represent Honduran newspapers or community organizations promoting pro-Hernández messages, according to an analysis by the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab. Among them was a page that again had advertisements claiming that Zelaya was the source of the protests, and two pages that printed the message that Hernández was dedicated to combating drug trafficking.
“They said we were inciting violence and that we had groups of criminals,” said Suyapa Figueroa, president of the Honduran Medical Guild, who became known as one of the leaders of the 2019 protests. ‘Some people were afraid of the [protesters’] platform because they thought so [the ousted president] Mel Zelaya was behind it. There were always fears that the movement was politically manipulated and that it could stop the growth. ”
Figueroa is still struggling with Facebook-driven disinformation. A Facebook page purporting to represent her has nearly 20,000 followers and has been used to ‘attack opposition leaders and create conflict in them’, she said.
“I reported it and many of my friends reported it, but still I could not take down the fake page,” she said.