'Fake news': Europe on its knees
The contemporary explosion of the phenomenon of fake news On a media scale, this occurred during the 2016 US presidential elections. Ten years ago. Donald Trump himself—the winner of those elections—is the creator of the meme. His communication exacerbates the spectacular nature of politics and is based on polarization as content in itself. The creation of these memes was done without restraint, without inhibitions or denials, to an exponentially higher degree than usual, and in a way that has become the style of many parties that take Trump as their communication model—or rather, the school of Steve Bannon, his then-chief strategist.
After those US presidential elections, the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal broke. Christopher Wylie, a Cambridge Analytica employee, revealed to The Observer and The Guardian that millions of user data points from the social network had been sold to campaign in favor of Trump. Thanks to this revelation, we now know that thousands of companies constantly synchronize and exchange their data, collecting it to then shape the messages that users see, thus creating tailored propaganda that is not recognizable, for example, as political propaganda. This mechanism works in different ways and for different purposes: to sell a product, a brand, a politician, or an ideological framework. The goal of this manipulation and profiling is not to convince everyone, but to increase the likelihood that specific individuals will react positively and engage with certain content, so that they become part of the mechanism and feed it. Its ability to modify viewpoints and, ultimately, voting intentions is proving to be much more effective than traditional campaign ads. This isn't a generic slogan thrown around by various channels; it's a personalized, targeted message that hits the bullseye. Furthermore, a basic online promotion service and social media It is twenty times cheaper than a traditional election campaign (posters, t-shirts, advertisements, etc.).
In 2018, in Mexico, network analyst and activist Alberto Escorcia discovered that during the country's presidential election campaign, at least 100 of the trending topics Twitter were created by botsIn Mexico, there is an industry dedicated to disinformation that, through a network of blogs with its own writers and bots Of unknown origin, it can either create or bury a debate on social media. These boats They were called Peñabots, after the Mexican president who created that huge industry. Escorcia has spent several years in hiding due to death threats stemming from his investigation.
The propagation and generation systems of fake news They are mutating very rapidly on a global scale. Thus, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, they began their transition to messaging applications, mainly WhatsApp, where the message is disseminated without being exposed, consumes less data, and is also present in areas with lower population density.
In Brazil's 2018 elections, which Bolsonaro won, Agência Lupa, a Brazilian fact-checking platform, analyzed fifty of the most shared images on WhatsApp. Only four turned out to be genuine. The newspaper Leaf of St. Paul revealed that large companies financed the mass shipment of WhatsApps in favor of Bolsonaro, worth $3 million; a practice that Brazilian law does not permit.
Since those years, far from slowing down, political disinformation has entered a phase of normalization and structural integration into institutional and partisan communication, with seemingly "organic" content and hybrid campaigns in which truth, deception, and outright falsehood are strategically combined. Political lies are tolerated and promoted by example as a standard electoral competition technique, with little effective control and structural impunity that remains linked, as from the beginning, to opaque financing, the license afforded by the lack of verification, and the absence of political will to prosecute this toxic business.
Political parties in the Spanish state are not exempt. The political parties themselves, the Court of Auditors, and the media companies contacted have all avoided responding to our requests—those of the Xnet network—for access to public information, invoking data protection laws (note: which should not apply to legal entities) or sending information wholesale without breakdown. With official channels closed, we monitored their official social media accounts using data analysis systems. As a result, among other things, we observed clear indications of a considerable number of fake followers on all accounts, reaching up to 25% in some cases. These fake followers are paid to spread and generate "noise," automated behaviors designed to cause distraction or confrontation and muddy the democratic debate. They are tools for artificially viralizing information produced and intentionally directed by "human" organizations. They are a means, not the source of the problem.
The conclusion is simple: to combat disinformation, it would simply be enough to go after a toxic business and its clients. Just follow the money, and all roads will lead us to the same place: political parties and partisan interests.
It's been making headlines lately that the deadline for the EU to respond to the US demand for automated access to the biometric data of all EU citizens (not just those traveling to the US) is December 31, 2026, if we want to continue traveling to that country visa-free. An empire doesn't expand easily without first convincing the population of the advantages of submitting to it. We have one year to prevent our political class from genuflecting once again to interests that are solely their own, while they condone bargaining with tools for manipulating the population.
