Rumors on social networks in contexts of violence in Mexico-Veracruz August 2011

Abstract

On August 25, 2011 there were many rumors in the port of Veracruz which dealt with attacks on schools and abductions of children by organized crime. These rumors circulated by traditional social networks (family, neighborhood, etc.), as well as virtual social networks like Twitter and Facebook causing a collective panic that paralyzed the city. Two twitters were imprisoned as "cyber-terrorists", which gave rise, in turn, to an unprecedented political mobilization that led to their release 27 days later. In this paper are presented the results of a research about the different rumors that were generated that day on Twitter, in a virtual community articulated through the hashtag #Verfollow. The corpus consisted of about 28 twitter accounts and an archive of 22 hours of that virtual space. Such corpus provided access to that anonymous conversation between individuals belonging to different social groups and cultural contexts of Veracruz. It is important to show the relationship, on the one hand, between these rumors with the multiple ways people are interpreting the violence and information censorship that they are suffering in Veracruz, as well as with their fears, and on the other, the link between rumors and the discourses that precede them and make them plausible or implausible. This study also allowed to discover 2 contrasting and in tension regimes of verisimilitude: on the one hand, the oral, anonymous narrative production that is based on "it is said" in the collective voice, and, secondly, a regime of verisimilitude linked to journalism that tries to peel off the first and appeals to objectivity, therefore calls for photos, videos and detailed records of what happened.