On Saturday March 14, the President of the Republic, Nayib Bukele, wrote on his Twitter account about the urgency of implementing a state of exception in the country, which sought to limit the mobility of Salvadorans in the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic. 19 that spread to all the countries of the world.
By that date, El Salvador did not register positive cases, but preventive measures were taken immediately, such as the closure of airports, schools, entertainment spaces and others.
From Twitter, the president made a call to the deputies of the Legislative Assembly to approve said petition and for that he took up a story from the multimedia medium The Telegraph.
“Italy ‘will let the people over 80 die’ because their health system is collapsed and they need to make room for those who are most likely to live. Seriously, I don’t know what they expect from @AsambleSV. We need the State of Exception ya! “, he tweeted at 4:55 pm This is how he would begin to use his account as the official government information channel during the health crisis.
Two hours later this article was denied in a tweet by the Italian Embassy in El Salvador. “The famous Daily Telegraph wrote a ‘fake news’. Italy, which has the second oldest population in the world (esp. Life 83) and one of the most advanced public health systems (almost free), despite the situation does not will abandon anyone “, clarified the consulate. However, Bukele did not correct.
That tweet, yes, marked the beginning of an unprecedented emergency, where Twitter became the official government channel. This social network – which was used from the first days of Bukele’s administration to order layoffs in state portfolios – during the pandemic was the main channel of information on infections, deaths, executive decrees with legal regulations and other announcements.
The problem: making Twitter an official channel did not mean that the use was eminently official. LA PRENSA GRÁFICA took up an investigation by the Department of Journalism of the University of El Salvador that addressed the use that Bukele made of his Twitter account during the first 73 days of emergency in the country.
The investigation revealed that the president’s account was positioned, during the national emergency of covid-19, as the main source of public institutional information, exposing not only updates on the development of the pandemic in the country, but also offered a high content of controversy. and proselytizing between his government cabinet and the opposition, mostly concentrated in the Legislative Assembly.
The researchers classified the information according to the type of publication: tweet, thread, reply and quote. Then according to their functions: informative, institutional, proselytizing, controversial, personal and alarmist. For the selection of the tweets, keywords and an advanced search were used that allowed the information to be collected in the desired time.
During the indicated period, the messages delivered by President Bukele were not informative, since many contained a high degree of proselytizing inclinations towards his cabinet and an evident controversial position before the Legislative Assembly and its deputies. Such is the case of this publication of April 10: “Excuse me, but you are less than garbage. And deep down you know it”, with which he referred to the opposition of the Legislative Assembly in a contemptuous and disrespectful way, after an alleged cyber attack on the presidential family went viral.
This type of tweets categorized as controversial reached 13 publications in March, 26 in April and 25 in May. In total, 64 tweets in 73 days to polemicize and attack anyone who thought differently than the ruler wanted.
Furthermore, it was discovered that the “Alarmist” and “Personal” functions coincided in the number of publications made in the study period; In other words, every time that Nayib Bukele tweeted in a personal capacity, it was mostly to instill fear and alarm the population about the context of the pandemic that the country was going through, in addition to including various accusations against the opposition regarding the actions of his government.
For example, tweets such as: “If the pandemic gets out of control, we will not cope, and a doctor will not privilege them, because they are deputies” or “And the worst thing that they invent rumors and plan attacks, of the lowest human quality, just in the middle of a pandemic. May God forgive you. “
These results indicate a multiple and transversal functionality of the new channels for the dissemination of government public information, which each Salvadoran with a mobile device and the Internet can access from anywhere in the world, thereby creating a meaningful image of their reality.
Attacks via Twitter
In the count, false news were also taken up by the president along with a speech against the media and journalists who questioned his decisions. In addition to the beginning of the now recognized confrontation against the Constitutional Chamber.
For Omar Luna, communicator, data analyst and teacher, President Nayib Bukele is a strong and extremely charismatic leader, he enjoys the support of the population and on that basis he takes advantage of the communicational dynamics offered by the social network Twitter to position a series of messages with which it seeks to make visible and positively communicate the communicational management of certain positions.
The expert highlights that this social network has positive and negative elements. From an integrated position, it favors communication, cooperation and community links, to the point that a collective intelligence can be generated that encourages people to establish positions on certain forms.
However, he points out that this social network is not the adequate mechanism to communicate and make visible a series of messages and positions that require some time of reflection, and as it lacks a highly argumentative structure (as other transmedia formats or other forms of communication would have) , it becomes extremely difficult or diffuse for some people to interpret beyond what the framing of a tweet presents.
“To such an extent that narratives can be re-framed, thoughts and consciences shaped, and above all, imaginary builds where there are good guys and bad guys, where we and others are, and where you can take a position on certain dynamics that somehow disrupt what happens outside of the social network, “he details.
In El Salvador, social networks are part of the daily life of the inhabitants. According to Internet World Stats (IWS) for the year 2020 in the country there were 4,284,000 Internet users, that is, 65.7% of the population, connected mainly through smartphones, where they use different platforms. * With the collaboration of Joel Castaneda and Pedro García, both journalism students from the UES.
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