More than a thousand Nicaraguan accounts on Facebook and Instagram were deleted just days before nationwide elections in Nicaragua with Meta justifying its move with claims they were part of the ruling Sandinista party’s disinformation “troll farm”.
The head of Meta’s global threat intelligence strategy, Ben Nimmo, announced on Monday in a post on Twitter that the social media giant had taken down “a troll farm” run by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party and the government of Nicaragua.
Contrary to Meta’s claims, critics argue it’s just another example of the social media giant “taking concerted actions against US enemies alongside the US government”.
The Meta report claimed the takedown included 937 Facebook accounts, 140 Pages, 24 Groups and 363 Instagram accounts in Nicaragua primarily run by the Nicaraguan Institute of Telecommunications and the Post’s (TELCOR) employees in Managua.
It adds that the accounts were one of the most cross-government troll operations they’ve disrupted to date, with additional smaller clusters of fake accounts being run from other government institutions, including the Supreme Court and the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute.
The report said that the fake accounts that showed up after April 2018, as the Nicaraguan government repressed the student-led nationwide protests, posted negative content and comments on the opposition and flooded Nicaraguan social media environment with pro-government messages.
Those protests which – according to Western press – culminated into a bloodbath at the hands of Nicaraguan police, were provoked by the passage of a reform law aimed at increasing social security contributions while lowering the program’s benefits, but was quickly revoked.
Critics stressed that they were both driven and amplified by meddling from the US amid Biden administration’s larger efforts to undermining support for the FSLN on Nicaragua’s elections this coming weekend.
On Friday, Reuters cited on Friday a senior State Department official as saying that that the White House is coordinating an international sanctions regime it wants to foist upon Nicaragua in response to the November 7 election.
US-based tech giants like Meta, Twitter, Google have taken similar positions in recent years toward other US official enemies accusing accounts from countries like Venezuela, Iran, Russia, Cuba, and China of being bots or paid trolls that post “coordinated inauthentic content” expressing opposition to the US State Department’s official narrative.
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