A group of students departed the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College for a protest in Iguala, Mexico, about 80 miles away. They never arrived. What happened on the road to Iguala remains a mystery, but we know that at least three students were killed and another 43 are missing. The government’s official story is that the 43 students were killed after being handed over to the Guerreros Unidos cartel on the orders of the mayor of Iguala. But investigations conducted by the Mexican publication Proceso and the U.S. publication The Intercept paints a darker picture of complacency at higher levels of government.
The incident was emblematic of broader fears and frustrations with violence and corruption in Mexico and sparked a wave of ongoing protests across the country. Like so many modern protest movements, activists turned to social media to organize and promote their cause. One Twitter hashtag in particular—#YaMeCanse or “I am tired”—became a central hub for organizing protests and disseminating information.
That’s when artist and journalist Erin Gallagher, who covers the protests for Revolution News, noticed something strange. The search results for #YaMeCanse were flooded with tweets that included the hashtag but no other content, save for a few random characters such as commas, semicolans, and angle brackets. A typical tweet might be: “,,> #YaMeCanse.” The accounts tweeting the empty content bore the telltale signals of spambots, such as a lack of followers and a tendency to tweet variations of the same thing over and over again. It became difficult, if not impossible, for activists to actually share information with each other through the #YaMeCanse hashtag, and as a result it quickly dropped out of Twitter’s trending topics. Bots, it seemed, had effectively jammed the protesters’ communications channel.
Gallagher and LoQueSigue blogger Alberto Escorcia say the bots have followed protesters from hashtag to hashtag over the past few months, drowning out real conversations with noise. They’ve also seen similar bots create fake hashtags in apparent attempts to push real hashtags out of Twitter’s trending list, spread anti-protest messages, and even send death threats to specific activists.
The post Pro-Government Twitter Bots Try to Hush Mexican Activists appeared first on Trunews:.
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