How a Mexican digital marketing firm is using Facebook pages, Twitter bots, and Instagram likes to spread fake news in the lead-up to the country's elections
Ryan Broderick / BuzzFeed : Tweets: @craigsilverman , @buzzfeednews , and @lisatozzi See also Mediagazer Tweets: Craig Silverman / @craigsilverman : Here we are in the summer of 2018 and people running bots/fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook are still operating in the open, and manipulating trending topics with ease: http://www.buzzfeed.com/... @buzzfeednews : Armed with millions of bots and thousands of fake Facebook pages, these the twentysomethings trying to hijack Mexico's politics with fake news http://www.buzzfeed.com/... Lisa Tozzi / @lisatozzi : “The only real obstacle to pushing fake news, dark ads, and inflated trending topics for Mexico's politicians has been getting government employees to pay him on time.” http://www.buzzfeed.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days before this investigation ran, the Washington Post documented Facebook's struggle to tell legitimate political campaigns apart from disinformation ahead of Mexico's vote. This reporting supplies the other half of that picture: a domestic digital marketing firm whose twentysomething operators run millions of Twitter bots and thousands of fake Facebook pages in the open, manipulating trending topics with ease.
The significance is that this is not a state operation — it is a client-services business, an early instance of what BuzzFeed would later trace as [[a:949428|a worldwide industry of PR and marketing firms selling fake accounts, false narratives, and pseudo news sites]].
First-order effects
- Mexican voters encounter coordinated fake news across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in the final week before the election, while the platforms' systems treat the activity as ordinary marketing rather than manipulation.
Second-order effects
- The same language and platform blind spots reappear north of the border: by the 2020 US election, Facebook and Twitter had again missed a deluge of Spanish-language disinformation aimed at American voters, suggesting the Mexican playbook exposed a durable enforcement gap rather than a one-off failure.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, election influence consolidates around commercial disinformation vendors rather than intelligence services, forcing platforms into a reactive cycle of post-hoc network takedowns like the ones Facebook eventually began publishing against Iranian and Russian operations.
The trend: Election manipulation is shifting from covert state campaigns to commercial marketing firms renting botnets and fake-page infrastructure across platforms and languages.