In late March, still comfortably ahead in the polls, awnings Santos had little faith in the network: his Facebook page had 19,000 fans while Mockus and was over 110,000 and were not even worried to create a Twitter account. However, when Mockus shot himself in the networks (and surveys) to Santistas they had to take the new media more seriously.
On 4 May, when Juan Manuel Santos announced his campaign for re-engineering that included expert advice from the rumor mill JJ Rendón also announced as part of its new approach to an aggressive campaign Internet strategy and social media. Sent press releases seeking to show their efforts, until then quite been compared to those of Mockus, as a phenomenon "historic." From that day, her fan page on Facebook has grown rapidly, creating new initiatives such as the "Wall of Shame" where users can report smear campaign against any candidate, and "Solution Colombia", where young people write what believe are the country's problems and propose solutions.
Santos campaign is completely sealed on the subject of Internet strategy. The Empty Chair spent a week trying to talk to a manager about it, but after many failed attempts, the campaign said that not discuss his strategy after the elections virtual.
What I could find is that Ravi Singh, the guru who managed the highly successful Internet strategy gringo President Barack Obama, is working with Santos in Bogota. The official version, perhaps to avoid more trouble for work visas, that Singh has apparently not, is not working in the campaign and is only here as a vendor to advise on the purchase of some computer software he sells his company.
adviser, always known for wearing a turban, runs an impressive level of mystery. Talking with him has been impossible for journalists and those working with them have had to sign confidentiality clauses of hundreds of thousands of dollars, so they are understandably reluctant to talk about it. All that is known is that he and his team, with impressive intensity, often working all night.
As they have not publicly explained, it is difficult to know exactly what the virtual strategy. And obviously, Santos is on the network, like all other candidates, supporters and genuine supporters who defend their ideas and argue for their candidacy. However, many of his followers also show a strange behavior in the network suggests this is fake profiles for propaganda purposes. The phenomenon is being seen, both in the empty chair and elsewhere in the network.
phantom users in Twitter, Facebook and email are circulating the comments he has left a Facebook user, "Julieta Benedet" allegedly recruiting "typists media" which will be paid for comment on web pages. The address and phone number are the same as those of the party headquarters of the U. But this "recruiter" is probably also false, created by enemies of the Santos campaign to make them look bad. As most of the "friends" by Julieta on page criticize horribly and clearly do not know or believe in their identity, and if the Santos campaign is actually paying for those services would not have it so clear for the obvious consequences that would bring.
, however, there is evidence that there are people dedicated to create user pages and irrigate the country's political comments pro and anti-Mockus Santos on the web. These are a few:
1. The strategic director provided that service Santos
She told a source The Empty Chair, Germain Girl, before the campaign's strategic director of Santos, between ideas offered in its policy advice was an Internet strategy that included the hiring of young people to leave messages in the forums to computer experts to help rank the candidate in the search engines like Google, which is known as SEO.
2. 'Users' gang discussed in
started in the empty chair a few weeks ago sets of comments appear to support Juan Manuel Santos did not look like the typical comments from our users for its content and because they engaged in conversation with other commentators. Looking
detail to these users, are interesting patterns. For example, in one article with 160 comments, at least 15 are suspected. In the space of two hours, between 2:32 and 4:27 pm on May 17, nine comments were made by five users, whose profiles were all created on 19 April, two weeks before they announced the re-engineering his campaign in less than twenty minutes between 6:28 am and 6:47 pm.
In addition to being created and comment at the same time, users yeseniapastrana, julianamesa, linamorales, johnstiven leonardogarzon and all share the same IP address, which means that all participants from the same computer or at least from the same connection Internet. This clearly points to se trata de una sola persona manejando varios perfiles dedicados a hacerle propaganda al candidato.
Este patrón se repite más tarde en la misma historia entre las 9:54 y 10:40 de la noche, aparentemente manejados por otra persona.
Este fenómeno es común en otros artículos de La Silla Vacía y en otros medios online como Semana, El Tiempo y El Espectador.
3. Los comentarios son todos iguales
Obviamente, no todos los comentarios pro Santos son de clones manejados todos por una persona. Por ejemplo, en esa misma historia, los comentarios del usuario CARMAH25 además de ser santistas son largos, comentan el tema del artículo, tienen sus propios argumentos y responden a otros comments. It is clear that this is a reader who expresses his ideas for the candidate as do the other users for Mockus or Naomi or Petro.
Comments from fake profiles, in contrast, are all virtually identical. Not only in the empty chair but in other media forums. They have two lines long, do not address the subject of the article, and sounds almost like slogans. Examples
4. The ghosts of Facebook
a couple of weeks ago, the user of the empty chair Luis Hernán Ocampo turned to look at the profiles of some new fans of Juan Manuel Santos page on Facebook. Although most are normal people, also found a pattern of suspicious features users.
were newly created profiles, no photo or profile with a photo of the logo of the U, with between 2 and 18 friends with the same features of a photo, and not all be fans of the page solamante Santos (when most People have hundreds of friends in that network). All were members of the Juan Manuel Santos pages-President and Youth with Santos.
On Twitter, users have also reported an influx of new users, no photo and no history who have dedicated themselves to make propaganda for Juan Manuel.
5.
poll sabotaged Semana magazine reported yesterday that he had to cancel a survey on how you're going to candidates in the debates for a "sabotage intended to alter the results." Until the early hours of Wednesday morning, the survey had an average of 3,000 votes per candidate, but after 9 participation soared more than 50 000 votes, nearly all supporting Santos. The atypical involvement led the magazine to cancel.
