Facebook announced on Monday that it shut down a “troll farm” allegedly run by the government of Nicaragua and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is vying for a fourth consecutive term in an election on Sunday.
The company — which recently adopted the new name of “Meta” — made the announcement in its “October 2021 Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report.”
Facebook says that in October, it removed 937 Facebook accounts, 363 Instagram accounts, 140 pages and 24 groups connected to the campaign. All of the accounts, pages and groups were allegedly connected to people in Nicaragua.
They called it “one of the most cross-government troll operations we’ve disrupted to date,” and said multiple state entities were involved.
This operation targeted domestic audiences in that country and was linked to the government of Nicaragua and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) party. We found one portion of this network through our internal investigation into suspected coordinated inauthentic behavior in the region, and another portion — as a result of reviewing public reporting about some of this activity, Facebook said.