In Colombia, leftist presidential candidate Gustavo Petro entered the first round of voting as a clear front-runner. But despite clinching a plurality of votes of 40% — over 10 percentage points more than the second-place candidate — he emerged as an underdog in the runoff against populist businessman, former mayor and 77-year-old TikTok sensation Rodolfo Hernández, whom The New York Times has deemed “Colombia’s Trump.”
Journalists in the region compared the election to a schoolyard food fight, noticing multiple trends in mis- and disinformation being slung from left, right and center. Unknown actors spread doctored photos linking candidates to late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and fabricated tweets in the name of certain candidates. There was also an uptick in personal attacks against both presidential and vice-presidential candidates this cycle, particularly against Francia Márquez, the Afro-Colombian human rights advocate, lawyer and running mate of Petro.
“You discover one and there’s so many new outlets for spreading misinformation, and some of them not only against the right or the left, but against everyone,” said Jeanfreddy Gutiérrez Torres, director of Colombiacheck, a Colombian fact-checking outlet and verified signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s code of principles. “And if you shut them down, they come back as two or three, like gremlins.”
Fact-checkers have seen a high volume of decontextualized photos on a range of candidates — from...
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