Last modified on Thu 15 Apr 2021 06.00 EDT
Facebook allowed the president of Honduras to artificially inflate the appearance of popularity on his posts for nearly a year after the company was first alerted to the activity.
The astroturfing â the digital equivalent of a bussed-in crowd â was just one facet of a broader online disinformation effort that the administration has used to attack critics and undermine social movements, Honduran activists and scholars say.
Facebook posts by Juan Orlando Hernández, an authoritarian rightwinger whose 2017 re-election is widely viewed as fraudulent, received hundreds of thousands of fake likes from more than a thousand inauthentic Facebook Pages â profiles for businesses, organizations and public figures â that had been set up to look like Facebook user accounts.
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