Between the Spanish and the
British elections – the one on November 10th and the other on December 12th –
the news-pages have been busy. Busier still is the social media with an endless
supply of generally negative posts coming from all sides. It’s a big pot in
either case – Spain to bring in either an angry left or right wing coalition,
while the UK is to get a firm or not so firm Brexit, or maybe even a reprieve.
Since many of the readers living in Spain can’t vote in either of
these elections, for one reason or another, it’s all something to either try to
stand above, or to observe with incredulity and anger.
Facebook, so popular with
many of us, is currently a place to visit with care and a pair of rubber gloves.
No longer kittens, girl-friends and beach scenes, it’s now filled with hatred
and poison. OK, and football too, and dogs. Some things are eternal.
Where do they find this sickness? On
special pages (or maybe they write it themselves).
It’s to be expected that if
someone re-posts stuff found on some extremist page, then it’ll be extremist
stuff. And thus, we race to the bottom.
Extremism is in, and more
rational centre-politics is out.
From Oxford University (here): “The majority of
growth comes from political parties who spread disinformation and junk news
around election periods. There are more political parties learning from the
strategies deployed during Brexit and the US 2016 Presidential election: more
campaigns are using bots, junk news, and disinformation to polarise and
manipulate voters.”
Besides the many provocateurs
and fifth columnists (Leapy Lee?) we must deal with, we also have the bot (not BoT)-driven pages from an attic
somewhere pumping out emotive propaganda and flat-out lies designed to
manipulate the readers. In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn gets a particularly heavy dose
of it; while in Spain, of course, it’s Pablo Iglesias – both being considered
as major threats to the ruling status quo.
However, a lot of this bilge is aimed at other candidates too. The Liberals are
seen (for once!) as a peril in the UK, Boris Johnson as another and so it goes
on.
Not much of this crude
barnstorming is positive. Tell us about your candidate, not about mine!
The Guardian
takes us to a commercial troll farm in Poland where ‘...an
undercover reporter infiltrated the company, giving rare insight into the means
by which fake social media accounts are being used by private firms to
influence unsuspecting voters and consumers...’.
The UK had (has?) the
notorious Cambridge Analytica (wiki) and Spain, apparently, has the services of an agency (here) which is currently pumping out well-prepared negative propaganda
(posters included) against all parties except the PP.
Indeed, ElDiario.es considers that ‘The dirty PP campaign does not comply with the
ethical codes of political communication: "It's like playing with marked
cards"’.
Pablo Casado, for his part, denies everything.
Between the clever
manipulations, the improbable news-stories (El
Español is always good for these) and the hate-merchants who pump out crude
attacks against their particular bug-bears, it’s a good time to steer clear of
social media. Until, at least, next year.
Think of it as an early
resolution.
No comments:
Post a Comment