End of preview - This article contains approximately 1452 words.
Subscribers: Log in now to read the full article
Not a Subscriber?
Choose from one of the following options
Back
Disinformation in Latin America
Down the road of domestic polarisation
Politics in Latin America has always been rough-edged, combative, and passionate. It would therefore be a mistake to entirely blame the spread of social media and new emerging communications technologies for the observed increase in partisanship, political violence, and use of hate speech. A wide number of other deeply rooted and structural factors are clearly involved, including inequality, poverty, crime, corruption, and political systems which do not adequately represent the population. That said, it is also evident that some of the more negative aspects of political behaviour have become more harmful, precisely because there is now a bigger and more comprehensive toolkit for disinformation. In short, the new technologies may be allowing what used to be fairly small-scale and localised dirty tricks to become much more widely effective.
- Introduction
- What’s in the toolbox?
- Hate speech in the mix
- Coming next: social media and artificial intelligence
- The ubiquity of social media
- The Cambridge Analytica story
- Brazil’s false claims of electoral fraud
- The ‘office of hate’
- AMLO’s information wars by press conference
- Petro: a president with a loudspeaker
- Media made in Russia
- The Chinese presence
- Down the road of domestic polarisation
- An army of hipster influencers
- How to regulate social media
- Fake news is worryingly resilient