La Jornada Editorial on March 21, 2025
Claudia Sheinbaum, President of Mexico. Photo: EFE.
In just four days, unknown individuals or entities spent 20 million pesos on social network X to launch a smear campaign against President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo and her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Using 147,000 bots (automated accounts that send or forward messages), the perpetrators of the attack generated 1,366 mentions with the hashtag #NarcoPresidentaClaudia in order to establish as a trend (main topic of conversation) the alleged link of the president with the Izaguirre ranch in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, where last week evidence was found that organized crime murdered and disappeared hundreds of victims of forced recruitment.
The magnitude of the resources and the number of accounts involved make it necessary to inquire who is behind this synchronized swimming that obviously does not represent a spontaneous trend, a current of opinion or a feeling of legitimate social sectors, but a million-dollar investment made by one or more wealthy individuals with the obvious purpose of damaging the popularity and prestige of the government. Insofar as 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 to spread it, it is clear that it is a form of coup-mongering whose objective has nothing to do with clarifying what happened in Teuchitlán, but with the attempt to destabilize the government and promote a regression towards neoliberal barbarism. Likewise, it is inevitable to ask whether the money mobilized so easily comes from criminal activities such as tax evasion, to which government critics are known to be addicted.
Whatever the answers to the questions raised, it is clear that so far this furtive coup-mongering is as sordid as it is ineffective, since the cash-driven installation of an X tendency has not found an echo in the social sentiment, which remains overwhelmingly favorable to the President and the movement she represents. In this sense, it is surprising that they insist on using the same tactics and peddling the same slander that proved ineffective throughout the last six-year term, the current one and the campaign period.
It is regrettable that a fortune is being spent – rightly or wrongly obtained – in such a twisted and sterile way, as is also deplorable the existence of a social network that has turned mud-slinging campaigns into one of its star products. If it already had serious problems of credibility and handling of misinformation when it was called Twitter, since it was acquired and renamed by Elon Musk, X has eliminated its weak data verification and content moderation mechanisms to the point of becoming a refuge for hoaxes, hate speech and media lynching. In its current form, the only regulator of this platform is money: those who spend the most on bots and trolls (artificial intelligence programs that debate and argue with users as if they were human and people who post offensive messages with the aim of undermining other points of view) impose their voice through mentions, likes and retweets.
These practices are unsettling the social and political climate in Mexico, but they can take a dangerous turn in countries where the government does not enjoy such robust popular support. For this reason, it is necessary to address their regulation, not for the purposes of censorship, but of transparency: if someone wants to pay to spread their point of view, it is fair that audiences know who they are, what their interests are and where the money comes from that they use in the attempt to shape public opinion. 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 to civic life, the failure of the smear campaign against President Sheinbaum reveals that there is life outside of X, that is to say, that this and other social networks are not society nor a representative sample of it, so the dominant discourses on digital platforms do not necessarily reflect the mood of society
Source: Cuba Periodista, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English