Governments, political parties, and candidates around the world have been known to use disinformation and information operations on social media to influence political discourse and the outcomes of elections. In this case study, we will examine an inauthentic Twitter network running a negative campaign designed to impact perceptions and influence the political decision making of domestic voters.
This inauthentic network of over 300 fake accounts, all claiming to be based in Honduras, are being used to coordinate and disseminate content intended to shape the nation’s online political discourse. Additionally, they are being used to suppress voting and drive Hondurans away from voting for certain candidates. We walk the audience through how we identified early indicators of disinformation activities, how we identified the network’s existence on social media, and how we evaluated numerous attributes about the network. We found that several different narratives are being disseminated about political candidates to influence the outcome of the upcoming general election. These narratives serve either to deride and discredit the political opposition and critics of the incumbent party. We also observe the utilization of GAN images as profile pictures, stolen profile pictures, and older Twitter accounts, which may be part of its intent to create established personas.