Fifty-five accounts and 42 Facebook pages, as well as 36 Instagram accounts, found guilty of seeking to mount influence campaigns in three Latin American countries (Bolivia, Venezuela, Mexico), were deleted at the end of ‘August by Facebook. So far nothing that is particularly unusual: the social network regularly announces that it has dismantled disinformation campaigns, bringing together a few dozen accounts, around the world.
But these campaigns were not quite like the others: first, because they emanated from an American company, a political lobbying firm called CLS Strategies based in Washington. And because its scale was also out of the ordinary: these pages spent more than 3 million euros on targeted advertising on Facebook and Instagram, according to researchers at Stanford University.
The pages identified by Facebook and these researchers primarily targeted residents of Bolivia, where elections are scheduled for October 18, and Venezuela, where political instability is chronic. A smaller portion of the messages were aimed at residents of Mexico. The various campaigns aimed to support the interim president (conservative), Jeanine Añez, in Bolivia and the conservative opposition in Venezuela. Some of the posts spread false information: one of the Bolivian pages masqueraded as a verification site, and in at least one case spread a message contradicting the findings of fact-checkers independent, qualified as “fake news”.
Internal investigation
Requested by the Washington post, CLS Strategies asserts that its operations in Latin America are not comparable to influence operations such as those emanating from Russia which disrupted the 2016 election campaign in the United States. “Our work in Latin America, and in particular opposition to dictatorial regimes, is not carried out on behalf of foreign entities – our work is funded and directed by clients from the countries in question”, says the CEO of the company, Bob Chlopak, in a statement sent to the American daily. The company claims to have launched an internal investigation, with the support of a law firm, and fired the director of its Latin American branch.
Jeanine Añez’s firm has confirmed that it has requested the services of CLS Strategies, but only for lobbying operations in Washington “In support of Bolivian democracy”. According to the interim Bolivian president, CLS Strategies only served as an intermediary to organize meetings with officials of the American administration. Stanford researchers have found traces of a contract for an amount of 76,000 euros between CLS Strategies and the Bolivian presidency.
The subject of influence campaigns is particularly sensitive in the United States, two years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, named after an American-British company which had illegally sucked up gigantic amounts of personal data to carry out campaigns in support of candidates from the American right. But also because this is not the first time that American private groups have been accused of carrying out disinformation campaigns abroad: in 2018, Facebook had to crash foreign political ads in Ireland, a few weeks before ‘an important referendum on the right to abortion. Several NGOs had denounced massive advertising campaigns funded by American anti-abortion groups in the country.
