Social networks and Mexican youth

Ricardo Ramírez, Mexico

The purpose of the article is to address the influence that social networks have on the decision-making of young Mexicans, focusing on the Facebook and Twitter platforms. Specifically, to study the level of influence that social networks currently have as instruments of power, mass communication and therefore builder of the collective thinking of young people in the country; revealed by the rapid transmission of thoughts that build and convince thousands in a very short time and by the importance given to external comments in these mass media, such as the press, radio and television.

Where the question that always prevails is, who influences whom?

The media, throughout its consolidation, have become basic institutions of the consumer society, being permanently the main opinion makers that homogenize the behavior of the population by transmitting its guidelines. The web has become a vital technological tool for the development of society, since all the activities carried out as part of its structure (financial, business, educational, artistic and entertainment fields) are developed through this technology.

Nowadays the network has allowed the presence of the human being to expand all over the world, without geographical or temporal borders. This communication dynamic is changing the way society relates to each other, creating new ways of socializing.

The new media era can be considered in terms of three evolutionary phases. The first phase began in the early 1990s, and was characterized by the dominant presence of entertainment media formats and communication technologies.

In the second phase, which began in the mid-1990s, technological innovations (Internet, the World Wide Web and e-mail) made room for new political platforms. The novelty of these new media was found mainly in the function of interactivity.

Finally, the third phase was characterized by Web 2.0 applications, which allowed a higher level of interactivity. Web 2.0, also known as social networks, makes it possible for two people or groups to interact and exchange ideas, videos, photos and news, altering human interactions through their ability to instantly share such thoughts, photos and videos, and have them registered on a platform that permits them to view them as they please, along with the possibility of commenting on them and sending it to others.

One of the most interesting characteristics of social media is represented by the term “user-generated content”, which refers to the different forms of multimedia content available to the public and created by end users. Therefore, people use social media not only to consume online information, but also to produce unique content for themselves, i.e. a transformation of content consumers into content producers.

The development of this public dialogue of instant multidirectional character and in combination with the possibility that any person can be part of the social network by making his or her profile, has resulted in an increase in the number of new accounts every day, in order to share thoughts, complaints or opinions with total freedom of expression.

This dynamic of operation has resulted in a marked individualism, which focuses on the I think, I opine and I denounce, regardless of the social position of the denouncer and the situation denounced. It therefore allows for a democratization of public opinion in which everyone has a personal opinion, no matter how pertinent, informed, or uninformed the commentary may be. While it is true that networks have allowed individuals to increase their connectivity and acquire knowledge on various topics, on the negative side, it also happens that in the absence of any restriction or filter with what is published, misinformation and subjectivity abound in them; strengthening the mentality of the opposites and the trivialization of public interest issues.

Currently, elements such as manipulation, advertisements and control of intentionally disseminated information to shape subjects, have become increasingly common on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, where young people as the main consumer are made the main target audience to influence. Demonstrating that it is possible to promote the social change, by incubating, infecting and exploiting people’s emotions. Now, thanks to social platforms, our identity and reality needs can be digitized, making it possible to build a system of perceptions of brands, leaders, trends, ideas, etc. in real time and in a furtive way.

In Mexico, thousands of publications of all kinds circulate daily through Facebook and Twitter, ranging from advertisements, activities of our friends, news from around the world, content of influencers, thoughts and notes regarding political parties, government activities, new policies, etc. However, on several occasions the content seen in them is intermingled, since not only real news are what we see, there are also tendentious publications, half-truths and impartial journalistic reports that tend to lean for or against certain political groups.

The issue of social networks and their ability to influence the perception that people have of their environment, is gradually becoming a problem that the Mexican state should start to worry about, because so far there is no mechanism, program, project, etc. interested in regulate the vast amount of information that circulates through them and to which its population is exposed all the time. In Mexico and around the world, social networks have become a way of life for young people, especially for the generations that were born with them. Today there are children who already have profiles within the main social platforms and whose intellectual development is totally permeated and therefore shaped by the content they receive from these social platforms.

They will in the future become youths with the ability to vote and make important decisions for their country, and they will make their choices based on the information they know, whether it is true or not. 

In October 2012, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook reached one billion active users worldwide. In the eyes of politicians, celebrities, media and academics, this platform has become one of the most important scenarios for social and political participation of citizens, especially young people. Social mobilizations such as “A million voices against the FARC” and the so-called “Arab Spring”, which led to the fall of the dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt, are proof of this. 

The networks grew up to become the new largest public squares in present society, since outside nations and religions, there is no other space that simultaneously articulates so many millions of people. Here social platforms became one of the most important spaces for users, who saw how those tools that seemed so innocent and only born for fun, were becoming other things. For example, in big platforms to make themselves be heard.

Soon networks became tools that empowered those who used them, originating citizens anxious to participate in society and democracy, willing to become ideologues, politicians, historians, and of course, journalists as well. The union of all these pillars facilitates the emergence of a new concept related to content generation: citizen journalism, which although born in the early days of web 2.0, thanks to mobility and new mobile applications, has acquired a global projection, as it allows any citizen to record with their mobile camera and social networks, what is happening anywhere in the world, even before the so-called “traditional” media.

Therefore, the combination of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter means that there is a greater number of young users who are more attracted to political issues, bringing with them a wide range of opinions and transforming the networks into the new public space for participation and socialization. It is a new exercise in micro-politics in which young people, using their profiles on the networks, have moved from political apathy to greater activism, carrying out protests and mobilizations through Facebook groups and micro-blogging tactics on Twitter.

This type of users, which are by generation, the most assiduous in the use of social networks, have also used these media as their preferred and mostly unique tools for obtaining information about politics. This situation can be approached from two perspectives; one positive, since the networks eliminate the filters of traditional media such as television, no longer depending on news organizations to decide which stories go on air and for how long, and another negative, which points to the same principle of freedom of dissemination, allowing Internet users to find all kinds of data, whether true or false.

An interesting point is that in social media, nothing works better to raise criticism among the population, than all those messages that appeal to the fact that the decisions of politicians, governments, entrepreneurs or agents in power or with power, abuse their position for their own interests. And in Mexico, this is something that happens every day, because the decreasing credibility in political bodies and representatives of society has led to the population becoming more inclined to believe all kinds of news in a new era of post-truth.

In the country, every day you can find notes that seek to distort reality, without necessarily falling into the lie, since in most cases the information is unreliable, weakly supported, or is selective. Since only a part of the text or story is given that can bias the interpretation of the content, according to the reader or the interests of whoever made the cut of the parts of the whole piece, which distorts, manipulates and misinforms social groups.

On the Internet, a false news that impacts can represent thousands of dollars in advertising, and even some serious media have established among their strategies the clickbait or “click hook”, which, through misleading or attractive headlines, distorts the reality of the note to get traffic to their websites and so obtain more incomes.

Take as an example the following publications made by recognized news media in Mexico:


The press reports that Banxico, Mexico’s central bank, made a design modification to the existing 100-peso bill, highlighting among all the changes, the transition from a horizontal to a vertical orientation. But this is not the end of the story, since what sparked off the furor of the Mexicans was the comparison that the media itself made between the new 100 bill and the Venezuelan bolivars.

It is important to emphasize that the media only mentioned the similarities between both currencies, however, this was more than enough information to gradually gain popularity for illogical ideas such as that the country was becoming Venezuela or at least that the economy was getting worse. A few days later, the next change in the image of the 1000 bill continued to feed this trend.

The news clearly lacked sufficient force to provoke some social mobilization, but it turns out to be a good element that represents the state of Mexican journalism. It privileges the dissemination of reports that misinform users, especially those less analytical, manipulating them to have erroneous ideas. It is a moment when the information provided is designed to exalt the circumstances where objective facts have less influence on the formation of public opinion, allowing those who appeal to personal emotion and belief to prevail, it is a moment of post-truth.

In this context it is easy to feed any tension based on trickery and lies, where common sense is surprised by the awareness that there are citizens who are capable of believing them. To achieve this, reality is exaggerated by selecting some real data, amplifying it and magnifying it in such a way that it becomes a completely biased message, but one that captures the attention and emotion of citizens quickly to accelerate its viralization.

With the Mexican news media increasingly immersed in the post-truth, it has contributed to disinformation among the population, since in the end it is possible to produce stories at the convenience of interest groups and the governing elites without caring if they are real or not, as long as they allow the mobilization of public opinion in a pragmatic way and in favor of the person who assumes the role of spokesperson.

With such a reality occurring in different parts of the world, it becomes easy to detect what are the weak points of a society in order to attack and manipulate it from the base. Two events stand out to illustrate this point.

The first of these has to do with Russian interference in the U.S. elections, where President Trump was favored to win the presidency. It was a well thought and executed campaign, which damaged Hilary Clinton’s image as a candidate and enhanced Trump’s image.

It all consisted of creating hundreds of fake profiles on social networks that spread leaks, and in order to have the greatest possible impact on the selected target, outrageous headlines were used to capture their attention. In addition, ads on Facebook and Google were bought to promote the existence of a website called DCleaks, which also hosted several Wikileaks-related leaks. Later, through investigations by the American intelligence services, it was shown that the website was part of the Russian plot designed to influence the US elections in favor of Trump. Meaning that Russia had included in its propaganda campaigns, the intensive use of social media to manipulate, intervene or alter the opinion of citizens of those countries or geographical areas that it considers to impact its geopolitical strategy.

The use of these platforms will turn out to be one more factor that citizens take into account to finish convincing themselves about a specific issue. And its effectiveness can be proven with the case of Brexit, where researchers of the Edinburgh University after analyzing hundreds of profiles involved in the dissemination of messages in favor of the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union, concluded that most profiles were controlled once again from Russia, transmitting about 45 thousand messages pro rupture during the 48 hours before the vote on the referendum. British youth were the most affected by the result, since they will see their salaries and job opportunities reduced, in addition to the fact that they will lack funding for scholarships that will contribute to their education and work practices.

As the second event, there is evidence of the capacity of social networks to feed the algorithms that determine how the stock market and the economy of a country will go. In this regard, there is an article by Huina Mao and Xiao Zeng, from the universities of Indiana and Manchester, in which and through a rigorous analysis, they demonstrated that there is a direct correlation between the behavior of the Dow Jones index based on comments and messages published on Twitter, with special emphasis on those tweets related to moods such as happiness, calm or sadness. Being possible to predict the fluctuations of the stock market with an accuracy of up to 87% and with a time margin of three days at most.

That is why we should not find it impossible to believe that it is possible to affect the economy of a country by manipulating its population through the use of social platforms. Like what happened on April 23, 2013 in the United States, when a cyberterrorist group called the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), by hacking into the Twitter profile of the Associated Press news agency, managed to instill panic throughout the country. 

The attack consisted of publishing a false message that would generate an immediate crisis: “Two explosions in the White House. Obama is hurt”. A direct appeal to the more emotional side of the Americans, which would avoid a reasoning of the situation. A demonstration of the use of the post-truth against an entire nation, leaving the population in panic and confusion, since it directly attacked its greatest representative and made them feel in a state of insecurity.

As expected on the economic side, the message created panic on Wall Street during the minutes it took to validate the information. Causing the stock market index to plummet 150 points, creating a mini-crash and making it lose 139 billion dollars.

Once it was confirmed that the notice was false and a product of a hacking of the account, the stock exchange recovered normality. However, the graph of the Dow Jones’ fall when the fake new came out, reflects very well the very severe effects that networks can have when they are used to spread false information, in which they strategically target the most emotional side of people to capture their attention and encourage its spread.

In Mexico, the use of the term “fake news” has been adopted since it began to be used in the U.S. presidential elections of 2017, and has been employed to denominate all those news stories, which as in the so-called post-truth, tend to be journalistic notes emitted with a distorted vision of the facts, and at the same time transmitted with a specific intention and purpose, which when combined with a lack of analysis and verification of the information by the reader, become viral and harmful.

Particularly among young Mexicans, it has become routine to learn about the country’s events through almost an exclusive use of the media. On Facebook, reading only the headlines while scrolling through the news section, and on Twitter, gathering information from all the Tweets that appear to them. This means that they do not take adequate care of the information they get through these means, allowing everything they read to directly influence the way they conceive their society and country. Missing elements such as reading the full note, which statistically only 3 out of 10 do, or looking for more information about it.

The social, economic and political context that the country is going through today requires that the phenomenon be approached from a transversal perspective in which each of the stages of the information generation chain is analyzed: the transmitter, message, reader, psychology, media, and the marketing around the message. However, for the moment, the Mexican government has not considered to create any action plan to try to counteract the effects of manipulation in social networks, which either by the media and national power groups, or by external situations, it can become a reality; as in other parts of the world it has already happened. Affecting citizens by encouraging hate speech, altering the free exercise of decision-making and promoting a culture of misinformation that weakens the society. 

So it is not surprising that according to the Trust Barometer 2018, conducted by the public relations agency Edelman, 80 percent of Mexicans consider false information as a weapon that can influence their decision making, being this the highest proportion among the sample of 28 countries considered for the study.

This high percentage may be mainly due to the fact that it was in the same year that the most recent presidential elections were held. Emphasizing the fact that they have been the first in which the subject of social networks was present in a real way, misusing them in order to affect rivals based on lies and false narratives.

The phenomenon should not be surprising given that social networks are a natural space where groups of people who are unhappy with the status quo manifest themselves, and furthermore, considering that in essence electoral campaigns are people trying to convince people, we can clearly understand why this type of media campaign is so successful.

It is not a minor factor to point out that the millennials represented an important percentage of the population that voted that year (almost 50 percent of the nominal list according to data from the National Electoral Institute), taking on the networks a greater relevance as spaces for information/disinformation. 

A wide variety of false notices were circulated, but one of the fakes news that stood out, was the article published by Frida Ghitis in The Washington Post, with the headline “A Mexican presidential candidate is getting an unexpected boost from Trump and Putin”. The publication was quickly viralized in the country and replicated by various journalists, politicians and even academics in the nation, concluding that the Mexican elections would suffer from a Russian interference.

There were protests, comments of discontent, disapproval and discussions about the issue in the major news outlets. The magnitude of the scandal was such that the opposition took advantage of it to discredit Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s victory, unleashing rejection among the population and encouraging the creation of Facebook groups dedicated exclusively to disseminating all kinds of content that damages the image of the new government, be they true or not.

And in spite of the fact that after various and rigorous analyses it was determined that the elections had been free of Russian interference, since after all, and being analytical about it, Russia does not have geopolitical interests in Mexico and the concentric circles under the geopolitical strategy of the Russian president do not manage to cross our northern border, as they remain in Washington, NATO and the European Union. The operation of these groups has not ceased; on the contrary, they have been created even more.

The problem with such groups that focus on constantly sharing information against the government is not limited to the fact that they do so through a large amount of fake notes, it is also due to the fact that their operation is favored by the way algorithms used by platforms such as Facebook operate.  After all, how does the information reach us?

Information is managed for us precisely because of what we ourselves share or react to online. If, for example, we frequently share news on a certain topic, we will automatically receive more information about it, advertising, related pages, and people reacting to the specific topic, including false information. And if we have also been emphatic in our sympathy or dislike of the same topic, this will also be a factor in what kind of news we receive.

For example, someone who follows climate change denial pages on Facebook will be much more likely to receive more encouragement that will lead them to pages with false climate change news. Then, this person will not think twice about sharing these posts, making this same false information accessible to their circle of friends and others.

That’s why it’s important to analyze, ponder and debug what we share and what comes to us through the networks. However, in July of this year the task of taking care of what we publish has become somewhat more difficult to achieve, as Facebook announced a change in its algorithm that follows the fundamental beliefs on which it was created; giving priority to publications by family and friends over company pages that users follow. This has helped to viralize “emotional” content, as it is easier to share what is directly relevant to our hearts than more rigorous and less “emotional” content.

All these factors can serve as an explanation for the internal climate that is being experienced every day in the country, because as a result of the last electoral campaigns and the large amount of false information with which the media bombarded the population, a strong polarization was caused in the society. Once a left-wing politician won, the idea began to be widely spread that we would move towards socialism, the Venezuelan model of government would be copied and we would end up in poverty. Even two years after the beginning of his government, these ideas continue to be replicated among the population with points in favor and against.

In these times, truth and criticism in the sense of justified beliefs built under logical and empirical rigor, are no longer relevant to public opinion. The new public space is filled with the truth with which I identify, and in the citizen’s thinking the enunciation of the world as he conceives it matters more, regardless of whether it corresponds to objective reality.

In Mexico we live in the moment of greatest polarization that has existed in at least the last 24 years. During the six-year term of Vicente Fox in 2002, there was more support among Mexicans on the right and there were divisions of opinion among those on the left. The approval of Calderon in 2008 shows a similar pattern, but with growing support on the right, yet at no time did Mexicans appear truly polarized.

With Peña Nieto there was already a greater polarization: higher support on the right (71 percent) and greater rejection on the left (also 71 percent). However, with Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexican society seems completely polarized: the left expresses almost unanimous support (95 percent) and the right expresses very high rejection (88 percent). They are completely opposite poles.

This demonstrates that post-truth, as a new planned and deliberate way of acting in politics, works and pays dividends. According to the government’s own data, in Mexico around 80 million people are not only Internet users, but also have profiles in some social network, representing 70% of the population if we consider 126 million inhabitants.

Even at the global level, the country is in fourth place in terms of average time spent using the media, so it is not surprising that it is now the preferred medium for influencing the population. The problem here is that the use of post-truth, false news and alternative facts, represents a delicate situation in the decision making process. Whether it is personal or group, for a city or a country, making a decision on a false basis is very dangerous, because it is difficult to achieve the objectives of a public policy, or a family or personal decision.

Upon waking up, the daily routine that the Youth reproduces not only in Mexico, but in practically the entire planet, consists in looking at the cell phone to find out what is going on. It is a reflex act that is more and more deeply rooted whether we like it or not, it will determine in a huge measure the mood and disposition with which we will start and face the day, both individually and collectively.

If we were to ask the population if they think the country is doing well, surely the answer that would predominate with a high percentage would be “no”, since in the end this is the perception that prevails thanks to what the Internet tells us. The virtual world has more and more weight in our real world. What are you thinking,” Facebook asks us every day, while Twitter wants us to tell it: What’s going on?

As a closing thought, we can say that the effectiveness of social platforms as a vehicle to influence the behavior of a society, has already been proven, being now interesting to know who is or are the main interested in influencing the way in which mainly young people, as main users of these, think. Although the media, as the supposed defenders of freedom of expression and information, are the first ones to use the web to distort it, it would also be interesting to know the reason why they do so.

The first victim of a conflict is the truth, and war is also a propaganda war. Young Mexicans with social networks as their new battleground, day by day they fight a battle that is not theirs. A struggle to which they were dragged by the media and in which they are “free” to take a stand according to the information they were given.

It is worth mentioning that the Internet by itself does not have the inherent capacity to create social change, rather it depends on the direction in which the activity of the users points, because at the end of the day, we are the ones who make the Internet, and therefore we have the capacity to stop the transmission of these contents that entangle us in a huge web of emotional and non-rational reactions.

The importance of education needs to be emphasized, and to this purpose a Chinese proverb is illustrated with words used in the support documents of the Commission of the European Communities in its program for permanent education: “For one year, plant cereals. For a decade, plant trees. For one life, train and educate people.

We should practice critical thinking to exercise the mind in a data contaminated world, and let’s question the veracity of all the information we obtain.

We can start by asking ourselves:

Are we truly “free” when we express ourselves on the Internet
about a particular fact or person?
Are we free when we act on what we have read on the Internet
and take for granted that it is valid and true?

Sources