"Silvia Orriols: the xenophobe who hates Spain and is sweeping the pollsWith this suggestive headline, La Sexta announced the report it aired last week about the leader of Aliança Catalana. It is not the first interview she has given to a Spanish media outlet. Other media outlets, some with a pro-Spanish stance, such as OK Daily and Global ChronicleShe has also been interviewed in recent months, always responding in Catalan. But the interest is not new.

This year, one of the research projects I served on as a panel for reached a fascinating conclusion, which I'll reveal at the end of this article. The project analyzed the range of leisure activities in Catalan aimed at young people. There was something for all tastes and ages. For the youngest children, there were musical and theatrical activities. These, of course, were chosen by their parents.

If Hamlet were alive today, perhaps he wouldn't question life and death, but something more mundane: being influencer or be a good influence. We live in a time when many young people dream of being influencersThis is understandable and even stimulating: having the ability to influence the opinions, decisions, or behaviors of others can be very appealing. Dreaming of having an impact isn't the problem; what matters is not losing sight of two essential questions: What am I willing to do to achieve it? And what impact do I want to create?

Young people and social media are two of the areas where Catalan is experiencing the most pronounced decline. Only 25% of young people They declare themselves Catalan speakers, a figure that rises to 40% if we include those who identify as bilingual, according to the latest Survey of Youth in Catalonia. The shift in cultural habits is also a factor. Young people's culture is increasingly virtual, and they don't frequent the traditional spaces where the government could have had an impact with public policies promoting Catalan: 70% of young people don't go to the theater, 50% don't go to museums or concerts, and 30% don't even watch television, according to [source missing]. a survey by Òmnium CulturalThe Barcelona City Council inaugurated this Thursday the House of Digital Creation in Catalan by focusing efforts on these two areas: young people and networks. But what do they think, the influencers From Catalan, about the situation of the language? We have spoken with some of the most influential specialists in the field today.

First came the web users Forocoches with those endless threads of the purest brother-in-lawismAs social media has grown, so has the rise of... influencers antifeministswho make money by leading the backlash against machismo and misogyny, promoting hostility towards feminists and proclaiming that "violence has no gender." So great is the influence of these men—who claim to fight for "men's rights"—that the UN has issued a warning about the dangers of their power. machosphere (also known as manosphere)) when it comes to attracting younger generations.

Among the powerful, there is open talk of defeating aging. Stopping the clock to reinforce established hierarchies and living as if life itself had no biological limits. The will to exist in capital letters, to never leave, the self taken to the extreme that defies even death. This is the context. The conversation between Xi and Putin, captured in Tiananmen Square by an open microphone, in which they were encouraged to live forever, or at least one hundred and fifty years, through organ transplants. Reality increasingly resembles a dystopian B-movie. But the megalomania associated with longevity—a euphemism often used to avoid saying immortalityLongevity is not exclusive to autocrats, but a distinctive status symbol that is beginning to outweigh money among the rich and powerful everywhere. This longevity is clearly not purchased to make selfless contributions to society, but rather, in most cases, serves to continue enjoying the adrenaline rush of power, fame, and victory over all others. sine die at the top of the pyramid.

"Young Spanish men, I need you to join the fight for Spain. I'm a woman, I shouldn't be doing this!" This is what Ada Lluch said in a message on X a few days ago. She would be a influencer ultraconservative who would have thousands of followers if it weren't for the fact that on Saturday, September 13, he gave a speech in front of Thousands of far-right protesters in London, at a rally against immigration. His case is particularly curious because he achieved this platform without being part of any party or organization.

With more than a million followers on social media, half a million of them on Instagram alone, Olot native Aniol Güell (Olot, 1997) has become a great ambassador for Mexican cuisine in just three years. And not just for the Catalan public, but his success has been, in his own words, being "a Spaniard who makes videos of Mexican food for Mexicans." Specifically, his specialty is tacos and he is known by the nickname @tacotios. In 2022, she moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, to study the final year of her degree in physical activity and sports sciences at the Euses de Salt University. It was a way to "escape" and, at the same time, "find herself" after the premature death of her father when she was 18. "Leaving only makes you grow," she reflects. "Since Olot, I always thought that I wanted to be like the people who leave. I needed my purpose in life."

With more than three million followers, María Pombo is one of the influencers most famous in the Spanish state. That's why, whether she likes it or not, anything she does or any interaction she has on social media becomes news. This week, the youngest of the Pombo sisters—all of them influencers– has gone viral for making a derogatory comment about reading enthusiasts. In a video posted yesterday on TikTok, Pombo said: "I think we need to start getting over the fact that there are people who don't like to read and that you're no better at making them like reading." The Madrid native was responding to a follower's comment about Pombo's bookshelf, which the influencer He had dedicated a video to it. "The bookstore is beautiful, but if it were full of books that have been read, it would be even more so. Now, all I see is junk," said this follower.

The French justice system is keeping an investigation open to clarify the causes of the death of a influencer while broadcasting live on Sunday night into Monday. Raphaël Gravin – known online as Jean Pormanove – was 46 years old and was known for hosting live streams on the Australian platform Kick, in which he appeared to be subjected to assault and harassment. He had over 500,000 followers.

She is the oldest Catalan-language content creator with the most followers, with 145,000 on Instagram. Àngela Coromina Roca (Prats de Lluçanès, 1931) has been sharing her life on social media for a couple of years now thanks to her grandson, Jordi Crous, with whom she maintains a close and comical relationship. Iaia Angeleta has become the grandmother of Catalonia for her sincerity, catchy laugh, and because she awakens in many people nostalgic memories of a relative or a bygone world.

At this time of year, unless we're enjoying a vacation, the desire to take one grows. To give ourselves a well-deserved break from the routine, we may have spent time and money planning a nice trip and finding the most suitable accommodations. To make up our minds, we can draw inspiration from some of the idyllic images that we've seen. influencers They post on social media: a paradise beach or a remote location, presented as if they were places yet to be discovered and providing a guaranteed escape. However, with influencers, not everything is always what it seems, and even if we get the impression that their recommendations are completely trustworthy, it's worth doing some checks before blindly following them.

Content creator Marina Castellví (2004) saw a TikTok video called Who you are according to the Barcelona nightclub you go to and decided to do it with his hometown, Lleida. No one had done it before, and he says the video was very well received. Thus, without meaning to, he began to claim Lleida: "I didn't do it with any intention; it came naturally to me. But it's true that I've always thought there's a lot of centralism, especially in the media."

Not many days ago a melancholic person of the characters trash For the time being, the television audience was utterly shocked as they wondered how the geeks had disappeared from television programs, they were so funny. They were surprised that in such cruel and unbearable times as ours, there were no characters tamarinds strolling around the sets, adding a touch of medicinal surrealism to television programming, which for too long has been explaining only ever-bigger catastrophes. The answer is simple: geeks are no longer on television because they're on social media. There are plenty of brainless people there, but with a large audience, an explosive mix that produces results as hilarious as those provided years ago by the my Spains, the Big Brothers, the Mazagatos, the tamars or the juanelgolosinas, who were killing themselves to get a spot on any program or magazine.

He has more than three million followers on YouTube and half a million on Instagram. YouTuber Robert PG. If you're over 35 and you've run into him on the street, you probably won't recognize him. But if he shows up in a school playground, he won't be able to escape the photo requests—I can confirm it. He's Koko Dembélé Coulibaly, better known on social media as Koko DC, and although he was born in Amer in 1994—"Puigdemont's village," as he explains with a broad smile—he considers himself a Girona native through and through. From the age of four, he grew up in the Can Gibert del Pla neighborhood with his eight siblings from two different mothers and a father who traveled back and forth to Mali. He studied at Maristes Girona, was recruited to play soccer for Germans Sàbat, loves running around the Devesa River, and if there's one place you'll find him partying, it's in the Plaza Independencia area.

That everything on social media is much more beautiful than in real life, we had no doubt at this point. What we perhaps hadn't anticipated is that what we see on social media can be so completely different from what actually happens, as evidenced by the case affecting the influencer Marta Hermoso. Her arrest, which took place in 2024 and has only just become known, has highlighted the rift between the image some people project on the internet and the real lives of these same individuals. A deep but invisible rift that is currently being classified as presumed, as she is awaiting trial. She explains how a simple friendship date ended up leading to her disappearance from social media, where she displayed her luxurious lifestyle, and a legal dispute involving at least four defendants.

Norway bans influencers from retouching their photos. As of this Thursday, in the Nordic country, an influencer will have to declare if their figure or features have been edited and if they have used a filter through a government-approved label. The law passed by the Norwegian Ministry of Children and Equality on Thursday also establishes the tag system for conventional advertisements. The rule applies to photographs in which body measurements have been edited, for example height or leg length, shape, such as making the lips thicker or the waist more pronounced, or skin colour. Also those in which a filter has been used. Failure to tag will carry penalties ranging from fines to possible imprisonment.