Argentina's Macri retaliates against popular comedian using secret, taxpayer-funded "troll centers." [View all]
A report published today in a Buenos Aires newspaper, Perfil, revealed that a massive wave of social network attacks against popular Argentine comedian Marcelo Tinelli after satirizing right-wing President Mauricio Macri were in fact directed by a secret, government-funded campaign.
"The work was done by specialized social networks," local social network consultant Pablo Sirvén concluded. "These systematic attacks were conducted by a task force directed by (Macri's party) the PRO, which specifically intervened in an attempt to discredit the subject (Tinelli) and then took down their accounts."
The consultant did a computer analysis of Twitter users who sought to popularize the hashtag #TinelliMercenarioK ("Tinelli, Kirchnerist mercenary"
- a reference to Macri's populist predecessors, former Presidents Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. Sirvén's data showed that "less than 2% of those who spoke negatively were real people."
"Most of these social media accounts, additionally, had never posted any comments or other content on any website or account related to Tinelli," Perfil writer Damien Naboth noted. "But all had links to known PRO 'troll centers', which in turn would artificially create large numbers of new accounts to follow the accounts posting the hostile tweets."
Macri's use of taxpayer funds to coordinate smear campaigns against opponents or public figures critical of him is not new.
As mayor of Buenos Aires, he was known to maintain a "Special Projects Unit" at taxpayer expense. The office, led by PRO loyalist Paula Uhalde, would engage in similar, rapid-fire social media campaigns and were denounced on numerous occasions for physically threatening opponents putting up posters or handing out campaign leaflets.
Macri also came under fire in 2015 after the discovery of vaguely-worded city contracts worth millions of dollars to fund media hacks such as sportscaster Fernando Niembro and political writer Luis Majul - the latter becoming especially notorious for his "anonymous source" hit pieces alleging corruption by the Kirchners and other opponents. Niembro, like the Macri family, was among those named in the Panama Papers scandal in April.
A similar campaign was bankrolled by one of Macri's best-known overseas supporters, vulture fund owner and top GOP contributor Paul Singer, both in Argentina and the United States. His Buenos Aires contact, far-right Congresswoman Laura Alonso, received hundreds of thousands of dollars to stage social media attacks against the Kirchner administration over its refusal to award his Caymans-based hedge fund NML a 1,600% payout on old defaulted bonds he purchased from resellers for $48 million.
Shortly after Macri took office, Argentina paid NML over $2 billion on these bonds and Alonso was named head of the Federal Anticorruption Office.
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