Twitter in Mexico: Social Media Users under Pressure

In Mexico, it can sometimes be hard to get crime updates from news outlets and, increasingly, through social media. The Mexican state of Tabasco sought to implement a law this week that would impose prison sentences for those who share false information via social media or the telephone calls. This comes after the neighboring state of Veracruz jailed two Twitter users, for posts that authorities say caused panic by erroneously reporting crimes. In a country where traditional media outlets fear reprisals for reporting about drug-trafficking organizations, Mexicans have turned to social media such as blogs, Twitter, and Facebook to share crime warnings. However, legal action by local governments and the recent public display of two bodies in Nuevo Laredo—allegedly murdered by gangsters as a warning to bloggers—suggest that the tide may be turning against social media users as well.

The Tabasco law—a penal-code modification approved by the state’s Chamber of Deputies on August 31 with implementation planned for the week of September 11—punishes those who “provoke chaos or insecurity” using social media or telephone use and carries a prison sentence of up to two years. The law gained approval six days after authorities arrested two tweeters in the neighboring state of Veracruz on terrorism charges for tweeting what police say was false information about drug-gang attacks on schoolchildren in the port city of Veracruz. The tweeters could face 30 years in prison, although the state wants to change its penal code to allow for shorter sentences, reports The Los Angeles Times’ La Plaza blog. In Tabasco, legislators insist their law is necessary to maintain social peace and halt the spread of rumors, citing the need to maintain the social peace and create new laws for new problems.

But these moves against social media use have proven controversial, with critics warning the law will restrict already-threatened freedom of expression in Mexico. Fidel Ordoñez, the attorney for the Veracruz tweeters, warns the terrorism charges constitute a violation of international human rights charters guaranteeing free speech, saying that the accusations were created “so that people will silence themselves on social networks.” James Bosworth writes for The Christian Science Monitor blog that the only beneficiary of these moves will be organized crime, “which thrives in situations without transparency.” Meanwhile, the Mexican twittersphere has taken up discussion of the laws, and tweeters have declared solidarity with the accused in Veracruz while mocking the harshness of the charges, declaring “Yo también soy #TwitTERRORISTA.” (I am also a “TwitTERRORIST.”)

Social media has gained a foothold in the country due to the hostile press environment stemming from the drug war. The Committee to Protect Journalists cites Mexico as the eighth deadliest country in the world for reporters. The Dallas Morning News’ Alfredo Corchado reports in the Spring/Summer 2011 issue of Harvard’s ReVista magazine that, since 2000, 60 Mexican journalists have been murdered and dozens more have disappeared. “Every journalist in Mexico—sometimes even I, an American journalist—wakes up to ask the following questions: How far should I go today, what questions should I ask, or not ask, where should I report, or what place should I avoid?” he writes. Observers say the degree of violence against journalists results in self-censorship by the Mexican press. Citing this self-censorship, the 2011 Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press for the first time designated Mexican media as “not free,” along with with Cuba, Venezuela, and Honduras. Andrés Monroy-Hernández, a Mexican PhD candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, writes in Nexos that “the local media are no longer a trustworthy source of information” and “have been replaced little by little with social networks.”

Social media use has exploded in Mexico. By March 2011 there were 4.1 million Mexicans on Twitter, an increase of 1.8 million from 8 months earlier. This represents 13.4 percent of all Mexican Internet users—a higher rate of market penetration than in the United States. Facebook is even more popular, with 23.5 percent of Mexicans on the site. Both serve an important role in helping Mexicans inform one another about crime risks, with Twitter being the more popular to that end. Tweeters use hashtags to track violence, with examples such as #mtyfollow in Monterrey and #verfollow in Veracruz. Monterrey-based blogger Arjan Shahani details this phenomenon on the America’s Quarterly blog, describing how Twitter saves lives and foments solidarity in the face of urban violence. Moreover, blogs keeps citizens abreast of drug-related violence that the press fears reporting, allowing them to interact and comment, as in the case of well-known “Blog del Narco.”

But Mexican bloggers have started feeling the heat already faced by traditional press. While drug-related violence has heretofore mainly targeted journalists, messages next to the two murder victims found hanging from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo this week warned those who use social media to report crime. “This will happen to all of the Internet snitches,” one read. The messages, signed with a letter Z—attributed to the Zetas gang—specifically singled out blogs like El Blog del Narco and Frontera al Rojo Vivo, where users can report crime. As J. David Goodman writes in The New York Times The Lede blog: “Between the murderous cartels and fearful authorities, Mexican social media users who are hungry for accurate news about the drug war find themselves caught in a dangerous place where information is hard to come by, hard to check, and potentially deadly to pass along.”

Learn More:

• Access the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Mexico page.
• Read ReVista's "Focus on Mexico" in the Spring/Summer 2011 issues, covering Journalism in the Americas:
• For more about how Mexicans are using Twitter to report crime, see Arjan Shahani's post in Americas Quarterly blog  and Andrés Monroy-Hernández's reporting in Nexos.
• See the Knight Center's map of attacks on journalists in 2010.