CONCERNS OF FAKE NEWS SPARK WARNING
Mexico’s presidential race already seeing disinformation
With the 2024 Mexican presidential election less than a year away, political analysts and academics warn of a wave of fake news and disinformation making the rounds on the Internet, a trend they deem especially worrisome as some of the falsehoods seem to come from the party in power —and the president himself.
Fake news has long been disseminated during electoral campaigns in Mexico and the current electoral cycle is far from being the exception.
Since June, when Mexico’s ruling party, Morena, and the country’s main opposition parties launched their internal proceedings to pick their contenders for the 2024 race, The Associated Press Spanish-language fact-checking team found about 40 fake publications across social media platforms, favoring or discrediting members of both sides of the political spectrum.
Political observers and academics say it is worrisome that, on occasions, unsubstantiated accusations against members of the opposition have come from President Andrés Manuel López Obrador himself.
“Clearly the president has been a factor in generating the type of misinformation that ends up being polarizing,” said Manuel Alejandro
Guerrero, a professor of social and political sciences at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.
He points to a recent incident in which López Obrador and his supporters accused Xóchitl Gálvez, a presumptive opposition presidential hopeful at the time, of planning to end a host of popular social programs implemented by his government if she were to win the presidency.
Gálvez decried the president’s comments as false and in early June secured a judge’s order guaranteeing her right of reply and allowing her to respond in person at one of his daily morning press briefings.
Morena did not respond to a request for comment about accusations of being behind falsehoods.
Most of the misleading content on social media about Gálvez came from accounts affiliated with Morena or López Obrador, the Spanish-language fact-checking team at AP found. But AP also found false information disseminated online against former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, one of Morena’s main contenders for the presidency.
One publication erroneously asserted that Sheinbaum was not born in Mexico, but in Bulgaria, thus making her ineligible to run for office.
Sheinbaum took to her social media accounts, calling on people to say no to fake news. She even displayed her birth certificate publicly in a campaign video, proving she was, in fact, born in Mexico City.