A suspicious group of twitter accounts tweeted a string of repeater tweets overnight on January 4, 2017. I took screenshots of the accounts & tweets and since it’s a small network, did a quick study to examine what the accounts are doing. It appears this network is boosting a few media outlets, mainly Excelsior, known to be a government mouthpiece.

Some of the tweets contained a link to Excelsior and some just had the headline & photo from an Excelsior article:

Update Jan 5, 2017 11:09am est: The link to the original Excelsior article is no longer working. A duplicate of the original article is still online at El ojo cibernético and I translated a screenshot of the original article further down in this blog.

Image: @3r1nG

The small tweetstorm happened in the context of the #gasolinazo protests that are occurring across Mexico over the hike in gas prices. There are road blocks in at least 20 states and protesters have shut down gas stations throughout the country.

Over the past 24 hours, incidents of people stealing fuel and looting supermarkets and gas stations occurred resulting in (as of time of writing) an unknown number of arrests. Netizens on twitter denounced that bots were attempting to discredit the #gasolinazo protests, portraying the protests as violent and encouraging looting.

LoQueSigue noticed some repeater bots and tweeted screenshots:

“Now bots are spreading the looting of another supermarket at Acolman. Who is coordinating and paying for this? They want to discredit #gasolinazo”

A reply to LoQueSigue says, “the photos were taken from the perfect angle… I’d be scared to take them so close” — the photo is 4 people who were detained for looting in Acolman, they’re shown sitting in the back of a police vehicle.

I looked at the accounts that participated in this tweetstorm and found 20 fake twitter accounts, 2 media-related twitter accounts and 2 facebook pages that appear to be working together.