2nd November, 2021
Facebook’s parent company Meta, on Monday, said it shut down a “troll farm” run by the Nicaraguan Government.
The closure is coming just days before presidential elections were set to hold in the Central American country.
Meta said the network comprising 937 Facebook accounts, 140 pages, 24 groups, and 363 Instagram accounts were run by the government of Nicaragua and the ruling Sandinista party.
“This is one of the most cross-government troll operations, we’ve disrupted to date, with multiple state entities participating in this activity at once,’’ a report by the company said.
The cross-platform campaign was primarily operated by employees of the Nicaraguan Institute of Telecommunications and the Post (TELCOR), while other “smaller clusters of fake accounts’’ were run by other government institutions including the Supreme Court.
According to the findings, the campaign, which Meta was also running on Tiktok, Twitter and YouTube among others, consisted of “positive content about the government and negative commentary about the opposition, using hundreds of fake accounts to promote these posts’’.
Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega was seeking a fourth consecutive term in the Nov. 7 election.
He has been in office since 2007.
The political opposition accuses the Ortega Government of attempting to silence all potential rivals and critics.
More than 30 politicians, business people, journalists and activists have been arrested since May, including seven presidential candidates.
The opposition has described the election as a farce.