Bots, a latent danger in Mexico: polarization in social networks

The non-conformity and polarization of the Mexican society accentuated in the last months with the 4T take other levels now supported in the technology mainly with the call farm of bots. The so-called "bot farm" produces false profiles of social network users in order to increase the number of followers of an account or to alarm Facebook or Twitter users with false news.

The way they do this is by sharing a large number of messages simultaneously, to drive certain interesting information or specific hashtags. In recent weeks, the press conferences of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador have become "hot" with the media on issues that have bothered the president. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador gave a report on the attacks on social networks that journalists received after last Thursday's conference, after which the labels on networks #PrensaSicaria #PrensaProstituida and #PrensaCorrupta emerged.

According to the report presented by Alejandro Mendoza Álvarez, head of the Information, Infrastructure, Informatics and Technological Linking Unit of the Ministry of Security, 73% of the tweets circulated in networks with these labels were real users and 26% were bots or paid accounts. In an interview with Siete24 Noticias, Jesús Caudillo, a journalist and digital strategy consultant said that bots farms are operated by the government and by political opponents.

"I am surprised that the president has focused the conversation and discussion on his adversaries, without making an in-depth study of what their adversaries are doing. There is a propaganda strategy to position issues, attack issues, and also position messages," the consultant said. He also pointed out that the study presented by the federal government requires more rigor for it to be conclusive.

"There is a study of months in which the propaganda networks are identified that in this case, I do not see the same rigor in the study presented by the president. For his part, Javier Murillo, president of the Metrics Council, explained that there are computer programs that can simulate human behavior within the Internet. These automatically perform repetitive tasks such as sending messages, emails or posting on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, tasks that would be almost impossible or very tedious for a person to perform.

What happens when these kinds of circumstances arise in which users who are taking their right to participate in social networks and say what they think are exhibited? Next time they will feel inhibited because they could be in the morning or get out of their network account and be affected by it.

Also, the President of the Council of Metrics said that not only polarization is dangerous, but also user behavior is dangerous and even on Twitter is allowed to have bots war. "I can say that there is a possibility that unfortunate moments in the digital media detract from the rulers," said Javier Murillo.