Fake News on FB is now influencing Mexico's presidential election

[Maraya1969]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/04/facebook-is-still-the-perfect-propaganda-platform-these-sketchy-mexican-pages-show-why/


After a covert Russian operation to fuel political divisions in the United States reached 146 million Facebook users in 2016, the company vowed to do more to stop fake news and propaganda in the lead-up to this November’s midterm elections. But a propaganda campaign underway in the Mexican presidential election is showing how easy it still is for unknown actors to use social media platforms to covertly influence elections.

Four websites in Mexico are using Facebook and Twitter to mount what appear to be coordinated attacks on Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the left-wing candidate who is leading in the polls ahead of the country’s July 1 election. Three of them are designed to look like traditional news sites; the fourth is a transparently anti-López Obrador page that claims the founders of López Obrador’s political party want to install a totalitarian regime in Mexico. It’s unclear who’s behind the sites—it could be foreign actors, special interests, or political campaigns themselves.

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A Mexican Facebook user scrolling through her feed in search of political news might encounter what appears to be a news report from El Mexicano Digital, one of the four sites, that says López Obrador and the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez share “terrifying similarities.” Then, after seeing posts from established newspapers like La Jornada that look similar, she might come across a story from Cielo e Infierno (Heaven and Hell), the Facebook page for another of the four sites, Morena.mx, that refers to an old interview in which López Obrador said he had high blood pressure and claims ominously in a headline, “López Obrador Is Sick.”