In the anti-AMLO ‘dirty war’, 30 million hate messages

Madrid. The war dirty on social networks against President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the left-wing presidential candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, has intensified in the last 60 days. And the numbers are clear: in two months up to 30 million messages have been published against AMLO and Sheinbaum on platforms like X, in which attempts are made to link them with organized crime and drug trafficking mafias, in line with the strategy designed by right-wing and extreme-right groups from Mexico, Spain and the United States, according to a recent report prepared by digital issues researcher Julián Macías, who directs the Pandemiadigital.net platform, and which also warns that a campaign of this magnitude and virulence.

The report analyzes the movement on social networks in the last 60 days and focuses above all on the labels in which the President of Mexico and the candidate Sheinbaum are linked to drug trafficking. And the conclusion, according to Macías, is that “the campaign revolved around the hashtags #NarcoPresidenteAMLO –20 million tweets published by more than 350 thousand different accounts– and #NarcoCandidataSheinbaum –more than 10 million tweets published by more than 250 thousand accounts–.” With which there would be a total of “23 million tweets from more than 373 thousand accounts, since most of them included both hashtags or some of its variants.”

Macías points out as clear elements that we are facing a campaign of war dirty the unique distribution of types of tweets always in similar numbers; where only one percent are original tweets, compared to 70 percent of retweets, 25 percent of responses and 5 of mentionsin addition to the millions of messages issued with the same spelling errors.

Macías maintains that “the total number of tweets launched, the vast majority by troll centers from the Xóchitl Gálvez campaign, they exceed 30 million; since to the 23 million already mentioned it would be necessary to add more than 4 million with hashtags wrong and other labels used to link the Morena political party and its candidates with drug trafficking.” Furthermore – he adds – “the massive and coordinated activation coincides in time with the publication of two articles on January 30 and 31 by the international media DW and Propublica. Both articles were widely disseminated on Twitter by the troll center from Xóchitl Galvez from 60 thousand and 90 thousand accounts, respectively. However, these articles were barely shared on Facebook, when the opposite is typical.”

Macías also warns that “although there are real people among the most active accounts, they are not the majority. In it troll center they have some common patterns; many of them are anonymous accounts and almost all of them have a ‘verified’ account – paid, to increase the impact -, their profile image is made with artificial intelligence or using images of models… and they add up to hundreds of tweets making mistakes in the name of the candidate they support. In addition, they are the target accounts to receive thousands of retweets from automated accounts of the same troll center and of tweets mentioned and responses.”

Macías’ conclusion is that “there are innumerable elements that demonstrate the artificiality of this campaign: the explicit use of automated accounts that publish the same thing, the repetition in each campaign of the same target accounts of retweets and broadcasters of the retweets, coordinated patterns of execution – even when publishing hundreds of thousands of tweets with the same error.”

Hence, the social media expert established that “the heights that this campaign has reached is something never reported before, given the very high volume of tweets with the same errors. The previous cases reported were just over 100 thousand tweets from the troll center of Bolsonaro, 74 thousand against the government of Spain or the 30 thousand in Ecuador and Peru.”