A group of accounts that exhibited bot-like behavior amplified three pro-government hashtags in Colombia between May and July 2019.

Colombia, like many countries in the Latin American region, is facing political polarization. In response to — and likely contributing to — this growing partisan split, Colombia’s ruling party sought to amplify hashtag campaigns on social media, all in an effort to improve the public’s perception of the party.

Using DFRLab’s bot identification framework and open-source tools such as Botometer, it becomes possible to better understand how those hashtag campaigns attempted to trend on Twitter using bot-like accounts.

Strategies to Shape the Conversation

#AriasEstamosContigo (“Arias, we are with you”), the most recent campaign of the three observed, boosted support for former minister of agriculture and rural development, Andres Felipe Arias, who is accused of embezzling state subsidies in favor of third parties.

On Twitter, Arias’s case turned into a battle between those who considered his sentence unfair and unreasonable and those who thought Arias should go to prison for corruption.

On July 12, 2019, the United States extradited Andrés Felipe Arias to Colombia, where he arrived to face a 17-year prison sentence and a fine of $9 million. According to TrendoGate, a web application that monitors hashtags and trending topics in different countries, the phrase “Andrés Felipe Arias” trended on Twitter at 8:27 a.m. local time that same morning. In addition to Twitter, many national and international media outlets covered the former minister’s extradition that morning.

Based on Twitter API data that day, 93,115 tweets mentioned Arias’s name. Between 5:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. local time, the topic reached its highest volume of mentions. An average of 72.8 tweets per minute mentioning Arias played out over the course of the day.