A detailed analysis of 1.1 million messages published between October 16 and 25 on Twitter about the protests in Chile shows an intense activity of Venezuelan accounts, a part of them identified as related to the regime. These are the main conclusions of the study of the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) service of the Atlantic Council think tank, that proved that 20% of the profiles based in Venezuela that spread messages about the protests in Chile are defined as por Chavez or Bolivarian.

Several active accounts in the dissemination of ‘chavista’’ messages have abundantly used slogans about the main crises opened in the continent such as #ChileResiste, #EcuadorEnResistencia or #BoliviaDecide. An example is Twitter user @juancardenasr26 , which exhibits an image of Hugo Chávez in his profile and has been the most prolific, with 214 messages a day such as “ Chile is the first and then Spain if it goes there… let’s do it fast », or« Alert, alert, walking alert, Bolivar’s sword for Latin America… ».

According to experts, the problem of interference in social networks is especially alarming in Latin America, due to language cohesion. Spanish is the mother tongue of almost 500 million people living in 19 American countries and social networks do not know about borders and are not subject to the supervision or regulation of a single country. Many governments, including the United States, Russia, China, and Iran, have digital news services in Spanish with the clear objective of influencing the politics of the continent.

Interference campaigns

Regarding the DFRLab analysis, the 1.1 million messages collected during nine days of protests in Chile were published by 421,868 accounts, of which only 47.8% made their location public. This set of users, 201,840 profiles, published 544,820 messages. Of these messages, 106,626 come from Venezuela and 20% of them, 20,443 in total, from accounts that are openly included in their biographical descriptions words such as Chavez, Chavismo, Chavista, Mature, Bolívar, Psuv, Bolivarian, Bolivarian or Diosdado.

As Esteban Ponce de León, DFRLab researcher, explains to ABC, the next step of the researchers is to analyze the activity and the relationship between Venezuelan accounts, including those described as Chavistas, to study whether their behavior obeys a coordinated pattern that Let us talk about an orchestrated campaign of interference from power. Regarding the conversation on social networks about the protests in Chile, Ponce de León studies “which accounts come from Venezuela, which could be identified as Chavez or Bolivarian and, in this sense, how these accounts have participated in these conversations.”

DFRLab is a digital research group that has unmasked numerous campaigns of foreign interference in social networks, several of them from Russia. The Atlantic Council is a bipartisan think tank based in Washington whose mission is to strengthen the transatlantic link and is part of the Atlantic Treaty Association, which supports NATO.