Can Social Media Help Break Through Mexico's Information Blackout? Joshua Keating - Foreign Policy
go to original March 13, 2013

With Mexican bloggers increasingly targeted by cartel violence as well, and Twitter users facing heavy-handed legal penalties, even social media comes with risks. (Jesus Alcazar/AFP/Getty Images)

Last weekend, a newspaper in Mexico's northern Coahuila state became the latest outlet in the country to announce that it would no longer report on the country's drug violence after receiving death threats from the Zetas cartel. The deicision by the editors of Zocalo follows a paper in Nuevo Laredo which made a similar decision after a series of grenade attacks last year.

A panel at the Cato Institute this week, co-hosted by Google Ideas,  addressed the question of how data and social media can be effectively deployed to gather information on the drug war, at a time when traditional outlets of information are increasingly self-censoring. As Google Ideas Director Jared Cohen explained in introducing the panel, Mexico is a rare case of a democratic country that has effective media censorship, not due to laws but due to threats of violence posed by non-state actors.

With reporters often unable to file on violent incidents, social media is now frequently filling the gaps explains New York Times reporter Karla Zabludovsky, who is based in Mexico city. "This is becoming the norm in many parts of Mexico," said. "Unconfirmed information from Twitter and blogs are increasingly replacing traditional media in the critical first hours [after an incident] and sometimes well beyond that."

But Zabludovsky argues this reliance on social media comes with a price.  "Anonymity means it is nearly impossible to verify who the sources are, if they are indeed at the scene they are reporting from, and what their agenda is," she says.

Mexico is certainly a vibrant social media environment. Internet usage has doubled in the last 10 years to at least 36 percent of the population - likely higher. 60 percent of internet users are active on social media and 20 percent of those are on Twitter, making Mexico the fifth largest Twitter community in the world.

Read the whole story at ForeignPolicy.com

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