Mexico

Pomerantsev, P. (2019)
 * Mexico. “Protests grew as the communication between users increased online, forming a dense lattice of interconnections – what computer scientists know as ‘capillarity’. ... He [Alberto Escorcia] found that every wave of protests had a certain amount of words that made the lattice of communication thicker, words that worked almost like magical magnets powering capillarity.”
 * Smear campaign against the protesters. “... the little nodes representing the protesters would stop interacting with each other and instead turn outwards to engage the attackers, and as they did so the thick lattice became thinner and the ball started to break apart into a shapeless, twitching mess.”
 * “For seventy years Mexico had been a one-party state in which ‘truth’ had been dictated top-down. People had accepted the reality the regime imposed on them as normal. Today bots, trolls and cyborgs could create the simulation of a climate of opinion, of support or hate, which was more insidious, more all-enveloping than the old broadcast media. And this simulation would then become reinforced as people modified their behaviour to fall in line with what they thought was reality. ... It is not the case that one online account changes someone’s mind; it’s that en masse they create an ersatz reality.”