There is a long history of foreign interference in Latin America and Venezuela specifically. In recent years, the US government has imposed crushing sanctions on the already struggling Venezuelan economy. An information war is also playing out on Venezuelan social media, though the actors involved are unknown. For 1.5 years I have tracked a hashtag associated with a group of right-wing political hackers who support the Venezuelan opposition. I’ve found blatant use of automation, coordinated inauthentic behavior and cyborgs in Venezuelan networks; accounts that tweet hundreds to thousands of times per day in order to push out a massive volume of media on Twitter.

One of these cyborgs tweeted at me in 2017 after I published an initial study about opposition hashtag, #TeamHDP. The cyborg told me they were using IFTTT to boost their tweets because of censorship. I believe the person who was running this account was likely an activist who genuinely believed they were trying to circumvent state censorship, but the Venezuelan opposition is far from censored on Twitter. To the contrary, their trends generate billions of impressions every day.

I’ve never seen anything with such a tremendous reach as this Venezuelan opposition hashtag, which is why I’ve continued monitoring it since I first found it in June 2017.

Background

In March 2016 Bloomberg published the investigation How to Hack an Election, which is how we learned that Andres Sepulveda, Colombian right-wing political hacker, had rallied Anonymous in Venezuela against Chavez in 2012.

I had seen some Venezuelan Anonymous accounts on Twitter and noticed they were using hashtag #TeamVene10, so I downloaded some tweets that corresponded with that hashtag in June 2017. That was how I stumbled across #TeamHDP.