“In 2024, Trump’s triumph revealed that we need to rethink how we understand digital spaces. I share with you lessons learned and methodologies to strengthen our work for human rights. In this Inspiratory newsletter we are attentive to the closure of the digital civic space in the region, and we are looking for ideas to face it with inspiration.
“As we continue to see columns and analysis on Donald Trump 🇺🇲’s triumph and its effects on Central America and Mexico, I want to invite you to think about this result from a different 🤔 angle. Trump’s victory is revealing something crucial: while leaders like him are better at listening, finding, and connecting with people, our traditional ways of understanding what’s happening online are falling short. In Latam, we have the examples of Bukele 🇸🇻 and Milei 🇦🇷.
“In 2016, in the United States, Democrats blamed their electoral defeat on Facebook and fake news campaigns. This year, eyes were on TikTok for the way the algorithm increases the divide between male and female voters, and on Elon Musk for making changes to X “at the platform level” to amplify Trumpist messages.
“We already know that when the spaces where people communicate are configured to show more of a certain type of content or to reinforce pre-existing beliefs, the digital public sphere is altered. But this narrative focused exclusively on deception and “evil content that contaminates passive audiences” is ineffective. It is also distracting us from understanding deeper transformations in our digital ecosystem and about the intersection between politics, citizenship and the Internet.🌐
“What we are seeing is more complex and challenging for those of us who work on human rights issues: digital platforms, with their designs and interaction mechanisms, are shaping new forms of citizenship. A telling example: in the United States, the most definitive voter movement came from the vote of young men, influenced not by tweets or posts on Facebook, but by new digital communities forming around “bro-podcasts” on Spotify, TikTok and YouTube 🎧.
“In the region we see a similar phenomenon. As I mentioned in the previous edition, digital communities are growing around supposedly successful formulas of entrepreneurship and “magical ways to unlock prosperity”. It is no coincidence that “manifest” is the word of the year in the Cambridge 💫 Dictionary, chosen for its growing use on social networks to refer to the practice of “attracting” success and wealth through positive thinking.
“These spaces, although they seem apolitical, configure narratives in their members where everything is reduced to “individual merit”, making invisible the unjust structures that we need to transform collectively. An example of the consequences of these narratives is raised by the Brazilian philosopher and political theorist Rodrigo Nunes, for whom the rise of leaders such as Bolsonaro or Milei is the result of entrepreneurship phenomena.
“As internet culture journalist Max Read 🇺🇲 points out, we need to be wary of hypodermic needle-like models, which see audiences as simply passive, thoughtless receivers: “One exercise that would be helpful in understanding TikTok’s effect on the electorate would be to take a step back, think less about the type of content you see there and more about the type of person TikTok turns people into. its users.” Read argues that digital platforms, with their incentives and structures, are shaping new ways of understanding our interests and social relationships.
“Faced with this panorama, blogger and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Ethan Zuckerman shows us a route: we need to listen more and better in the digital world. It is no longer enough to analyze hashtags, count retweets or only have the voices of politicians and journalists on the radar in X. As Cristina Vélez details in her analysis of the recent exodus of accounts from that network, our fixation with this platform may be distracting us from the places where our audiences really are. In addition, in the case of Central America and Mexico, X is particularly manipulated by influence operations, netcenters and political influencers who pay on their own to be more visible.
“Throughout 2024, at Las Lupas, the Inspiratory’s digital listening laboratory for civil society, we are dedicated to developing listening methodologies in unexplored digital territories, using non-traditional social listening metrics. What we found is hopeful: there is a lot of life and potential to resist from the community beyond X. But we have to start now.”
Ready to dive deeper into these methods? Here are six explorations that we did and that fill me with optimism. As tech journalist Katelyn Chedraoui 🇺🇲 says, as some spaces close and corporate social media becomes increasingly commercial and less social, many people continue to find community in smaller, more meaningful digital ecosystems. In Central America and Mexico, these spaces have a lot of potential to flourish 🌱:
✨ Let’s look outside of X
✨ Facebook isn’t dead
✨ Pay attention to comments
✨ Let’s take more advantage of WhatsApp
✨ Let’s look at the relationship between influencers and their audiences
✨ What the ads reveal
[The e-mail discusses each of these six explorations and gives examples of how social media listeners are being influenced. This is followed by a video on Instagram called: “Leé de Influencers a Circulos de Apuestas: Como la promesa de plata facil atrae a miles Sin Advertir Riesgos” [in Spanish only.]
🎁 I leave you with a little gift: if you have a few hours free this vacation, I invite you to listen to El Péndulo, a podcast produced by Noticias Telemundo and Radio Ambulante Studios that explored the electoral process in the United States from the perspective of Latinos, a population among which support for Trump grew. Through tours of churches, squares and neighborhoods, the project documented their feelings, needs, dreams and hopes. Among the many reflections that this podcast left me, a phrase from journalist Paola Ramos, about her learnings from covering the campaign, especially resonated with me:
“We are journalists who are used to asking questions, to having very clear stories, but we are at a time when we have to listen (…) It’s a very difficult job because we have to put a lot of stereotypes aside, and just listen so that people aren’t afraid to tell us what happened.”
SOURCE: La Lupa Digital, by Shari Avendaño, Venezuelan journalist and illustrator. E-mail: 12 December 2024.