In just four days, unknown individuals or companies spent 20 million pesos on the social network X to launch a dirty war against President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo and her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Using 147,000 bots (automated accounts that broadcast or forward messages), the authors of the attack generated one million 366 mentions with the hashtag #NarcoPresidentaClaudia in order to establish as a trend (main topic of conversation) the alleged link between the president and the Izaguirre ranch in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, where last week evidence was found that organised crime murdered and disappeared hundreds of victims of forced recruitment.
The magnitude of the resources and the number of accounts involved force us to ask who is behind this synchronised swim, which obviously does not represent a spontaneous trend, a current of opinion or the feelings of legitimate social sectors, but rather a million-dollar investment made by one or more wealthy individuals with the obvious purpose of denting the popularity and prestige of the government.
To the extent that it is carried out anonymously, without disclosing to the public the identity or potential conflicts of interest of those who create the dirty war or those who pay for it, it is clear that it is a form of coup whose objective has nothing to do with clarifying what happened in Teuchitlán, but rather with the attempt to destabilise the government and bring about an involution towards neoliberal barbarism. It is also inevitable to ask whether the money so easily mobilised comes from criminal activities such as tax evasion to which well-known government critics are addicted.
Whatever the answers to the questions raised, it is clear that so far this furtive coup is as sordid as it is ineffective, since the installation, at the point of cash, of a trend in X has not found an echo in social sentiment, which remains overwhelmingly favourable to the President and the movement she represents. In this sense, it is surprising that there is a reliance on using the same tactics and peddling the same slander that proved ineffective throughout the last six years, so far this term and during the campaign period.
It is regrettable that a fortune – whether well or ill-gotten – is being spent in such a twisted and sterile way, as is the existence of a social network that has turned mud-slinging into one of its star products. If it already had serious credibility and disinformation problems when it was called Twitter, since it was acquired and rebranded by Elon Musk, X has eliminated its flimsy data verification and content moderation mechanisms to become a haven for hoaxes, hate speech and media lynch mobs. In its current functioning, the platform has no regulator other than money: whoever spends the most on bots and trolls (artificial intelligence programmes that debate and fight with users as if they were humans and people dedicated to publishing offensive messages in order to undermine other points of view) imposes its voice by dint of mentions, likes and retweets.
These practices are a thorn in Mexico’s social and political climate, but they can take a dangerous turn in countries where the government does not enjoy such robust popular support. It is therefore necessary to address their regulation, not for purposes of censorship, but for transparency: if someone wants to pay to broadcast their point of view, it is only fair that audiences know who they are, what their interests are, and where the money they spend in an attempt to shape public opinion comes from. In this way, both freedom of expression and the right to distinguish between information and propaganda are safeguarded.
Finally, and without underestimating the risk of disinformation for civic life, the failure of the black campaign against President Sheinbaum reveals that there is life outside of X, that is, that this and other social networks are not society or a representative sample of it, so that the dominant discourses on digital platforms do not necessarily reflect the social mood.
(Taken from La Jornada).
