Peñabot

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto at the inauguration of a Car factory in the city of Celaya.

Peñabots is the name given to what analysts believe to be a network of automated accounts on social media used by Mexican government to spread pro-government propaganda and to marginalize dissenting opinions in social media. The bots were first noticed in the 2012 elections when they were used to disseminate opinions in support of Enrique Peña Nieto in social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.^[1] During Peña Nieto's subsequent presidency, analysts have noted that Peñabots are used to overpower trending topics that critique government, to flood trending government critical hashtags with spam, and to create fake trends by pushing alternative hashtags, and to push smear campaigns and threats against government critical activists and journalists.^[2] Peñabots can be distinguished because their pattern of activity is distinct from that of normal interaction activity in social networks.^{[3][4][5][6][7][8]}

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