In Nicaragua, a digital raid deflates the virtual image of the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo

A few days before the presidential elections of November 14 in Nicaragua, Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, revealed that it has carried out a real “Digital raid” against profiles, false accounts and malicious pages of the Government of Daniel Ortega. Specifically, Meta suppressed, on Facebook, 937 false accounts, 140 pages, 24 groups, as well as 363 accounts on Instagram.

According to Meta, the false accounts or profiles were “linked to the Government of Nicaragua and its party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, and sought to influence public opinion in favor of the Executive and against the opposition.”

Meta’s announcement was not new to Nicaraguans who have suffered harassment and threats from fake accounts. “Magazine Confidential has investigated this ‘Ortega network’, which now Meta officially calls ‘trolley farm’ “, says to DW Mildred Largaespada, analyst of political communication in social networks.

The great contribution of the report is that, in addition to confirming the existence of the intimidating practice of the Ortega / Murillo regime, Meta has detected how, from and on which sites it works: “It is an intergovernmental network that has used institutions and public employees to use false profiles, to inflate the propaganda content of the regime,” says the Nicaraguan expert from Spain.

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One of the consequences of the work of this trolley farm is that “half of our writing of the magazine Confidential She is exiled ”, illustrates Largaespada.

Another of the victims of the threats is the renowned journalist Luis Galeano, exiled in the United States since 2018, when the public forces took over the canal’s facilities. 100% News, arrested its director and issued arrest warrants against other journalists, including Galeano.

“In Nicaragua, the majority of journalists have been victims of stigmatization and accusation campaigns; They have created smear campaigns and fictitious crimes for us, ”says Galeano, host of the popular analysis and opinion program“ Café con Voz ”, which he continues to present today on social networks.

List of digital perpetrators: yesterday threatening, today deleted

“I keep a list of people who have threatened me through social networks. After Meta’s announcement, I checked their profiles and it happens that they appear suspended ”, the journalist Largaespada tells DW. An exercise that, according to her, she will ask all her colleagues to do.

To attack opponents and journalists, the regime of Daniel Ortega and his wife and vice president Rosario Murillo has used students. Ortega has encouraged them to join the “digital battalions” as their Venezuelan counterpart Nicolás Maduro calls them.

The National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN) is in the middle of the storm because its official Facebook account would have been considered part of the “support network” of the uncovered trolley farm.

“What Facebook has done brings a tail because both the false accounts and their followers were suspended. Therefore, students who have only followed these networks are also considered part of the farm. The directors of the UNAN have not yet responded to DW’s question about their alleged responsibility in the operation of manipulation of public opinion and the probable use of students in it.

A system that bends, under threat

For Mildred Longsword, there is a fact proven by research from Confidential and the users, that is, the same students who followed these accounts now eliminated: “All public institutions in Nicaragua have had to bow to the regime’s mandate, under the threat of consequences such as losing their job or the university scholarship, taking into account that they are low-income youth from the public university. “

Galeano considers the manipulation of young people “obscene” and adds that “the regime distorts history to make the youth believe that Daniel Ortega is a kind of Messiah. They have created the legend that Ortega was the great guerrilla who fought against the dictatorship and was in all the combats, when the truth is that he faced only one ”.

He who does not have real support, creates a virtual one

How much does the Ortega and Murillo regime need trolling farms, if it has the backing of the public force? “He needs it, and a lot,” says Mildred Largaespada, an expert in Research Methodology in Social Communication.

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And he explains: “As, in Nicaragua, practically all free media have been silenced and the regime has installed terror in the streets, in such a way that citizens cannot express their political opinion in public spaces, social networks are the only space left to Nicaraguans to express their political ideas. “

This is the reason why “Ortega began to impose his ideas on social networks,” concludes the analyst: “As Daniel Ortega’s followers in Nicaragua are so few, the regime chose to create false profiles and, to increase the number of , resorted to the network of supporters of Maduro ”, as evidenced by the number of likes from Venezuela. Another pending task for analyst Largaespada is “to measure how much the Meta digital raid has affected Nicolás Maduro’s network.”

Facebook is currently in question before the users of the world. So “it is likely that the operation in Nicaragua is to demonstrate that they are working on the elimination of false profiles and the malicious use of the algorithm,” acknowledges the expert.

The right is to have an opinion, not to deceive

Did Facebook take a long time to act? “A lot,” Luis Galeano replies, and recalls that Facebook admits that it knew about the operation of the trolley farm since 2018. But, for him, “the elimination of the trolley farm comes at a time when the Ortega / Murillo want to give the impression that November 14 is an election. “

For this reason, it calls on all the media to follow what is happening in Nicaragua “with greater rigor, because what is at stake are human rights, freedom of expression and the rule of law.”

For Mildred Largaespada, however, “Meta’s action in Nicaragua is positive, since the followers of the Ortega / Murillo regime have every right to express their opinion on social media. What they do not have the right to is to alter the public account with deception and from false accounts. An abuse that only Facebook and Twitter could stop ”. (I)