For eight years, Peruvian investigative media outlet IDL-Reporteros has denounced attacks against it, especially after publishing high-impact investigations. They range from criminal complaints and attempts to force its reporters to reveal their sources, to attacks on their headquarters and street harassment, as well as defamation and disinformation campaigns.
IDL-Reporteros has responded with legal recourse when appropriate, but above all with what they do best: investigative journalism.
“When the disinformation campaigns intensified around 2023, we decided […] to combat disinformation and disinformation campaigns against IDL-Reporteros with investigative journalism,” Romina Mella, editor in chief of IDL-Reporteros, told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).
With these investigations – in addition to refuting the false accusations against them – they reported the existence of a disinformation machine and coordinated and organized attacks, while identifying the people involved.
However, the recent investigation carried out in partnership with the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP, for its acronym in Spanish) not only confirmed the existence of an entire disinformation machine, but also identified the pattern of attacks against the media outlet and its director, Gustavo Gorriti.
“These are smear campaigns and disinformation campaigns designed to attack, stifle and threaten investigative journalism,” Mella said. “They aim to turn investigative journalists into targets of investigation, and politicians or those involved in serious corruption cases into victims of political persecution.”
This is one of the findings of the investigation “All Disinformation Agents United Against IDL-Reporteros” by CLIP and IDL-Reporteros, with technical support from Cazadores de Fake News. The investigation is part of the “Los Ilusionistas” series, led by CLIP in partnership with 15 media outlets in the region. The series aims to unravel political and electoral disinformation during 2024, considered a “super election year.”
Although there were no elections in Peru in 2024, the CLIP team had identified a “disinformation apparatus” in the country that had been operating since the previous elections and that was still active. Furthermore, it was clear that they needed to understand and investigate what was happening with Gorriti, José Luis Peñarredonda, editor of disinformation investigations at CLIP, told LJR.
“Gustavo is a very unique case. He is one of the deans of investigative journalism in Latin America. He has a decades-long career, highly respected both outside and within Peru. On the other hand, he has been the victim of attacks on a scale and proportion that is very difficult to measure compared to the size of the country,” Peñarredonda said.
The attacks against Gorriti – who was granted precautionary measures by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2023 – are extensive. Currently, there is at least one open criminal investigation against him and Congress has called him to testify after accusing him of bribery, influence peddling and obstruction of justice.
According to the CLIP investigation, the disinformation operation aimed to destroy IDL-Reporteros’ reporting into the Lava Jato and Lava Juez, or Cuellos Blancos, cases. Reporting series from the Peruvian media outlet outlined a scheme of influence peddling and favors by prosecutors, judges and magistrates in the highest positions to manipulate judicial processes in favor of criminals, businessmen, lawyers and congressmen.
The CLIP investigation exposed the method behind the “disinformation orchestration.” The team was able to demonstrate that this method consisted of five stages or steps: initiation, amplification, pressure, street harassment and legal action.
One of the most relevant players, and where it often begins according to the investigation, is Willax Televisión. This is a television channel owned by Erasmo Wong, a businessman who is himself facing legal investigations for alleged money laundering, and who has also been mentioned in reports by IDL-Reporteros.
According to the CLIP investigation, in most cases, Willax, as well as other similar media outlets such as Expreso and PBO Digital, publishes information against IDL-Reporteros, which is then republished on social media, especially X. On this point, Willax published an article stating that the CLIP and IDL-Reporteros investigation has "biases and inaccuracies," although it does not deny the information.
In the amplification stage, other platforms and politicians, opinion-makers, as well as trolls seeking to stir up disinformation, begin to participate.
The pressure stems from the involvement of lawyers and spokespeople for those being investigated either in the courts or in the reports of IDL-Reporteros, according to the CLIP investigation. In addition to continuing to spread disinformation, they demand legal action against the journalists. They make demands of the prosecutor's office and the judiciary, and threaten prosecutors and judges if they fail to comply.
Street harassment, which is the fourth stage, is when groups –usually from the far right– arrive at the IDL-Reporteros headquarters "to utter insults, threats, defamation, in some cases to throw garbage, excrement, with total impunity and inaction on the part of the police," Mella said.
Mella reported that they have also done this at Gorriti's home, in addition to carrying out doxxing campaigns where personal information of Gorriti and other members of IDL-Reporteros is exposed.
Finally, when disinformation has been disseminated repeatedly, people linked to these investigated persons or involved parties file criminal complaints based on the aforementioned disinformation.
“It’s important to have done this investigation to identify patterns in terms of the attacks, how the campaigns are formed, how they are disseminated, and what the consequences are, which I think is the most important thing,” Mella said. “How disinformation campaigns are used by people of interest—and by that I mean politicians under investigation for major corruption—to discredit and delegitimize journalists and criminalize investigative journalism.”
Mella also believes this investigation will help identify similar patterns of attack targeting other media outlets. According to Peñarredonda, while the IDL-Reporteros case is emblematic, they’ve started to identify attacks on other outlets in the country.
Finding this pattern took the team at least six months of work.
“We had to verify a lot of information,” Peñarredonda said. “The volume of the investigation is what made it so time-consuming.”
Given that social media is a key weapon in many disinformation campaigns, reviewing X accounts and posts took a lot of time. Using a tool that allows access to Twitter's ‘firehose’—a real-time data stream that provides access to 100% of published posts—the team downloaded the posts related to IDL-Reporteros and attacks against it.
According to their records, from 25,000 to 30,000 posts could be published daily as part of the campaign, Peñarredonda said. In one of the cases documented in the investigation, they identified an average of 517 posts per hour, with peaks reaching up to 1,500 posts per hour.
Once they had all this information, they began to identify the “timing patterns,” Peñarredonda said. That is, to analyze when the attacks “spiked,”and compare this information with the documentation of attacks against IDL-Reporteros that the Peruvian outlet accumulated over the years.
“That’s how we found out that Willax was the first step. They launched their program and it all started,” Peñarredonda said.
With this timeline of peaks and beginnings, they began to identify the main actors involved in these campaigns: identifying the people behind the accounts and determining the power they had as spokespeople.
“The methodology we applied was based on two very common-sense questions: who is speaking and who is being listened to?” Peñarredonda said.
At this stage, the prior investigations by IDL-Reporteros were vital, Peñarredonda said, since they had identified many people, usually politicians and others under investigation for alleged corruption cases. Of course, accounts also surfaced, which, although they could not be determined to be fake, are “quite suspicious.”
These accounts typically lack identifiable names and real photos. But above all, they show no signs of “life,” Peñarredonda said. In other words, they only post or repost information about Peruvian politics.
Next came understanding what happened afterward. The most important conclusion is that these campaigns have real repercussions; that is, they can be seen both in physical attacks (street harassment) and in criminal lawsuits.
Peñarredonda said they found six cases of attacks that followed the same pattern, but only two were published in the investigation.
“It didn’t make much sense to repeat the same information,” he said.
“It’s an interesting case study, and it also helps us identify patterns in other cases. What happens with other news teams in the region?” Mella said. “Just as we investigate transnational corruption and illegal economies, and join forces as journalists to investigate all these large networks—which wouldn’t be possible without collaboration—it’s also important to develop alliances to investigate how disinformation attacks, threatens and seeks to discredit investigative journalism, especially given the contexts in which we operate.”
This article was translated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Teresa Mioli
