On 21 June 2026, Colombia decided the closest presidential election in its recent history in a runoff won by far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella. Before and after the vote, allegations of fraud, doubts about the pre-count software, challenges to the results and accusations of foreign interference took a central place in public debate, driven in large part by Gustavo Petro's social media posts.
Those narratives did not stay inside Colombia. Between 10 May and 23 June 2026 — 44 days spanning both rounds — ProBox, with the support of Linterna Verde, monitored coverage from eight outlets with ties to the Russian, Chinese and Venezuelan states: teleSUR, Resumen Latinoamericano, Sputnik Mundo, Actualidad RT, TASS, CGTN, Xinhua and China Daily. The sample gathered 372 posts across websites and official accounts on X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, whose combined following exceeds 252 million.
The central finding: 41.4% of that content focused on allegations of fraud, foreign interference or institutional crisis, while official responses and the mechanisms for verifying the process were pushed into the background. The Latin American block was the most productive (187 posts, 50.3% of the sample), the Russian block second (127, 34.1%) and the Chinese block third (58, 15.6%). The investigation found no evidence of editorial coordination among the outlets analysed, but it did identify a shared pattern: they gave more room to moments of heightened political controversy than to the contextual elements that would allow readers to understand them.