How Organized Troll Networks Attack and Harass Journalists and Activists in Mexico Tanya O'Carroll - openDemocracy
go to original January 24, 2017

The techno-censorship Alberto witnesses online is simply the latest frontline in a hidden war that aims to silence journalists and those who speak out (Alberto Escorcia)

What is happening online is nothing more than a reflection of what is happening offline in Mexico.

“Since the war on drugs began in 2006, we've lived through the worst period for freedom of expression”, says Alberto Escorcia.

Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries on earth to be a journalist, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. It is also in the middle of a human rights crisis, stained by the disappearance of almost 30,000 men, women and children over the last decade – the most since the current president, Peña Nieto took office in 2012.

The violence – and the impunity shrouding it – has energized a new generation of digitally-savvy Mexican activists who want to see accountability for the human rights abuses committed.

Alberto is one of them. In 2012, he became active in the #YoSoy132 student movement, initiated in protest against Mexico's political elites during the presidential campaign that year. Using an online pseudonym, Alberto called for some of the protests and quickly became adept at analyzing social media data in order to be able to organize more effectively. That´s when he started to notice a dark new presence on social media:

“At first their tactics were unsophisticated. They were basically spambots that would flood Twitter with thousands of automated tweets. They were a nuisance, hijacking hashtags we were using to organize protests and filling them with spam and false information.”

The spambots were relatively easy for Twitter to block. By adjusting their algorithm they could detect when hundreds of tweets with the exact same message were posted within a split second, and automatically mark it as “spam”.

But the tactics soon evolved. Instead of automated bots, real people started to operate the accounts, making it hard for Twitter to differentiate between spambots and real users.

And where there is demand, there is a market. Alberto believes there is now a whole commercial sector underpinning the trolls, in which people are paid to spread misinformation and abuse online.

“They've not really got a political agenda. They could mobilize for any cause they're paid for. I've seen them organize to promote the government's new energy reform bill and to lobby against a proposed sugar tax. The next day they could be working together to make a death threat go viral”.

It's not easy to prove. One of the trolls' hallmarks is how opaque and difficult to investigate they are. Like a black hole, we can see the activity surrounding them but in the centre remains a big question mark. How many people are behind the accounts? How are they organized?

The little Alberto knows is thanks to a repentant troll operator who approached him in 2014 out of guilt. She confessed to having been paid 50,000 pesos an hour (almost USD $2,500) to run up to 150 accounts against Mexico´s #YaMeCanse protests, which swept the country in the wake of the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students (YaMeCanse means “I’ve had enough” in Spanish).

Read the rest at openDemocracy

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