The Chains That Chose a President
Colombia's 2018 presidential race was saturated with false claims forwarded through encrypted WhatsApp chains, from doctored photographs to invented rumors about the leftist candidate. Researchers who tracked the campaign found that the app's design let those messages spread faster than fact-checkers could reach them.
When Colombians chose a president in June 2018, the contest was fought as much in private group chats as on television. The runoff on June 17 pitted Iván Duque, a conservative senator, against Gustavo Petro, a leftist former mayor of Bogotá. Duque won the second round with 54.03 percent of the vote to Petro's 41.77 percent, according to Colombia's official count as tabulated in the record of the election. The campaign that produced that result was, researchers say, awash in disinformation carried through the country's most-used messaging app.
An anticommunist narrative, rebuilt in pixels
Much of the false material recycled a long-running attack on the left. Petro's opponents, according to a study published by the Social Science Research Council, followed “the anti-communist narrative by photoshopping FARC leaders wearing Petro shirts” and warned that a Petro presidency would turn Colombia into “another Venezuela,” wrote researcher Jamie Horowitz in the council's Democratic Erosion series. FARC, the guerrilla group that had signed a 2016 peace accord with the state, remained one of the most polarizing symbols in Colombian politics, and the manipulated images tied the candidate to it.
Other claims were invented outright. The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which monitored the vote, documented viral hoaxes that circulated in the final days. One widely shared Facebook post, published on June 8 by a page called “Oigan a mi tia,” used a photograph of the former adult-film performer Mia Khalifa but labeled her “Claudia Merlano,” presenting her as Gustavo Petro's illegitimate daughter who was voting for Duque; it was shared more than 23,000 times, digital forensic research assistant Jose Luis Peñarredonda reported for the lab. A separate video that spread on June 15 wrongly told first-round Duque voters they did not need to cast a ballot in the runoff because their vote was already registered, a message that prompted an investigation by the Attorney General's Office.
Why the chains were hard to break
What made the messages resistant to correction was the platform. WhatsApp was ubiquitous in Colombia: an estimated 87 percent of the country's internet users were on the app, wrote journalist Pablo Medina Uribe in the Wilson Quarterly. Because conversations are end-to-end encrypted and confined to closed groups, a debunk posted in one chat does not travel with the rumor into the next. Horowitz noted in the Social Science Research Council essay that even when false claims were corrected, “it is highly unlikely that [the debunking] gets to the community that viralized it in the first place.”
The lab's monitoring found that the principal spreaders were not anonymous bot networks but recognizable people. Well-known partisans and politicians seeded claims that then circulated through family and friendship chains, where they met little resistance. The same dynamic surfaced after the vote: Petro alleged fraud without conclusive evidence, and the hashtag #fraudeelectoral drew more than 288,000 tweets the day after his message, according to the Democratic Erosion essay.
Fact-checkers against a closed network
Colombian newsrooms tried to meet the rumors where they spread. The digital outlet La Silla Vacía, founded by journalist Juanita León, ran a WhatsApp “lie-detector” that invited readers to forward suspicious messages for verification. The service received roughly 40 requests a week and had published 28 WhatsApp fact-checks by early 2018, Medina Uribe reported in the Wilson Quarterly; the tool was managed day to day by Natalia Arbeláez. The volume underscored the asymmetry: a single newsroom checking a handful of claims a week against messages forwarded through millions of private phones.
Colombia's 2018 vote has since become a reference point for researchers studying how encrypted messaging reshapes elections. The doctored photographs and invented endorsements were, in the end, ordinary in form — the kind of material that spreads on any platform. What set the case apart was the channel that carried them, one built for privacy and, by design, closed to correction.