2023-11-22 05:01:50
12:01 AM
The noise and protest songs against President Gustavo Petro on November 17 before the match between the Colombian National Team and Brazil were the big topic on social networks for several days, there was everything: attacks on fans, defenses to the president and innocuous comments that acted as neutrality. Behind it, as usually happens with the controversies that shake the Casa de Nariño, there was a whole movement of wineries on social networks aimed at generating trends and indignation.
From November 18 to 21, there were 388,000 mentions on social networks of the issue of Petro and the noise in Barranquilla, made by 352,000 accounts, a figure that shows that it was not an organic response from the citizens but rather an orchestrated movement through bots or warehouses.
This movement is evident when verifying that on November 18, one day after the game, mentions went from 52,000 to 91,000 in a matter of hours. The trend continued until last Monday, November 20.
An analysis carried out with digital listening tools allows us to see that 72 percent of all those publications on social networks have neutral language; 23 percent negative and only 4 percent provide a positive outlook. Many trills in X showed neutral support for President Petro, or simply mentioned his name through a hashtag.
Now, the behavior of the publications on Twitter allows us to see that the conversation was driven by wineries when the origin of the mentions is seen; Colombia has 124,000 and is followed by Venezuela with 13,000, the United States with 12,000 and then there is a strange distribution: Turkey 1,600, Angola with 400, Arabia 200, Algeria 100, China 200, Turkmenistan 100, Russia200 and Romania 100.
The list of countries with a small contribution is enormous and shows that behind the criticism or comments to Petro for the noise in Barranquilla, it was at least a strategy made with computer programs.
Although there has been a lot of talk about the use of social media platforms to discredit people or intimidate them, in this case it has a particularity: and that is that state resources, that is, paid for by everyone, would be used to silence the opposition or the critical voices and even journalists and the media.
The mechanism operates as follows. A critic of the government publishes something that bothers the ruler (Maria Jimena Duzán, asks him if he has an addiction or Noticias Caracol reveals the scandal of the ‘Picota Pact’ or congresswoman Kathy Juvinao exposes the irregularities of the reform to the health) and each of them are hit with a shower of attacks thanks to thousands of accounts on the X network, many of them anonymous or fake.
It is a virtual space, but if it were transferred to the world of flesh and blood it is as if one of these people started walking down the street and they harassed her with screams and threw stones at her for what she just said against the ruler.
And therein lies the problem, because the Government cannot use public resources to harass public opinion, much less to attack or insult it. It is curious that the control bodies have carried out investigations to sanction those who have threatened to kill the rulers from social networks, which should undoubtedly be done, but no processes have been carried out to see if the governments, by using and paying By these anonymous armies of virtual vandals, some type of crime or disciplinary failure could be configured.
Just as in the political campaign what was happening was an operation to destroy the character and prestige of his competitors (it happened with Sergio Fajardo and Alejandro Gaviria), now, already in the government, the social media warehouse machinery would be dedicating themselves to a 3.0 censorship operation (or are we already at 4.0?), because, in the face of harassment and grievance, public opinion, the opposition and the Government’s opponents, may prefer to remain silent than to submit to that public ridicule that, although it can Originating from fake accounts has an impact on each person’s psychology and, above all, can cause serious reputational damage.
“They are willing to symbolically kill those who do not think like them,” House representative Catherine Juvinao said a few weeks ago amid tears, and added: “They want to finish us off. I don’t think I can last four years like this. “The weapons of the moral hitman kill psychologically and emotionally.”
And the mechanism also works in reverse. When some public figures praise the ruler, the virtual bravas come out to applaud the character so that his way of thinking feels ratified. Without a doubt, there are well-known public figures who, beyond political positions, want, or need, that recognition. Even thousands of accounts created from a single computer.
The wineries and the attacks through social networks by the government had a new discussion this week when Congresswoman Catherine Juvinao accused journalist Camilo Andrés García of conspiracy, after the communicator indicated that Juvinao had participated in media manipulation in together with journalists in the middle of a debate on health reform. Subsequently, it was learned that some left the plenary session of the House due to the “lack of guarantees” in the debate.
“If you say that your ‘job’ is to combat disinformation, but at the same time you have contracts with the Presidency and distribute disinformation against the president’s critics, you must respond disciplinaryly,” Juvinao published in X.
The annoyance did not end there and the congresswoman, whom the Petrista wineries have attacked without mercy, wrote: “The office of the Presidency of the Republic of Colombia hiring winemakers to insult and slander (both things are a crime) critics of the government . President Petro, it is very serious. You must clarify to the country if you are financing wineries, and why.”
García spoke with EL COLOMBIANO about Juvinado’s words and said that he does have a contract with the Press and Communications Office of the Casa de Nariño to investigate and deliver a report on “disinformation and its relationship with the country’s information ecosystem,” a academic analysis.
García said: “I am not doing any monitoring, I am doing a content analysis, which is something that private and public entities have been doing for many years in Colombia. They call it media monitoring or social media monitoring. And I make my method public, because I believe in transparency (…) I have already received several death threats for doing this.”
García denied that his work resembled profiling, although many times movements on the left or right have wanted to make network monitoring as such.
Juvinao also spoke with EL COLOMBIANO: “We are seeing that public servants, officials, an advisor to the Presidency’s office, are dedicated to amplifying this type of slanderous attacks, as he (García) did with me last week, all because I Last week I made a complaint along with many congressmen that they were denouncing some articles on the health reform on Wednesday. Well, the Petrist winery takes my video of statements in the media and they invent a constitution.”
Juvinao says that the problem with García is that from his account he amplified the lies that the Petrista wineries invented, something that leaves suspicions if García’s contract with the Presidency of the Republic is taken into account.
The big doubt that remains in this scenario, and beyond the study carried out by García, is whether the wineries that come out to defend Petro and attack those who dare to question his actions (cases such as that of the journalist María Jimena Duzán or the writer Carolina Sanín) are paid with public money. The authorities should investigate whether Colombians’ money is used in strategies of this type.
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