Russian Influence Operations Increasing in Latin America

On 13 Jan­u­ary, Stop­Fake report­ed on a study by Valerie Sen­ger and Jacob P. Bassech­es from George­town University’s Cen­ter for Latin Amer­i­can Stud­ies, reveal­ing a notable increase in pro-Russ­ian sen­ti­ment in Latin Amer­i­ca, par­tic­u­lar­ly evi­dent through Span­ish-lan­guage tweets since Rus­si­a’s inva­sion of Ukraine in 2022. This study, ana­lyz­ing tweets relat­ed to key events dur­ing the inva­sion, found a ris­ing trend of pro-Russ­ian views among Latin Amer­i­can Twit­ter users, with a sig­nif­i­cant engage­ment in tweets from anony­mous accounts dis­play­ing pro-Russ­ian sen­ti­ments. These find­ings sug­gest a con­cert­ed effort in influ­ence oper­a­tions, like­ly involv­ing fake social media accounts, echo­ing con­cerns raised by U.S. gov­ern­ment and glob­al pol­i­cy experts about Russia’s strate­gies to manip­u­late online dis­course. The research, guid­ed by Dr. Juan Luis Man­fre­di and Dr. Ange­lo Rivero San­tos of George­town Uni­ver­si­ty, under­scores the evolv­ing land­scape of dig­i­tal influ­ence and geopo­lit­i­cal manip­u­la­tion in Latin America.