Page 14 - MONTT LATIN AMERICAN MAGAZINE, OCTUBRE 2021 (English)

The World’s Largest Users
There is no doubt that much of what was achieved in these and other countries was accomplished thanks to coordination through social media. Not surprisingly, Latin America has the largest users in the world, who spend an average daily screen time of 212 minutes, in contrast to North American territories with 116 minutes. Two countries in Latin America, Brazil and Colombia, complete the podium of those most hooked on social networks, with 225 and 216 minutes a day on average, respectively. Chile is the Latin American country with the highest percentage of Internet penetration: with more than 14 million people connected, it reaches 76 percent of the total population. The communities of Internet users from other countries are of course much larger; in fact Brazil has 126 million and Mexico, 67 millions, for example, but none of them exceeds 60 percent in percentage terms. On the other hand, however, the high presence of the Internet at a social level is not directly consistent with time online in Latin America. While Argentines consume 293 hours per month and Brazilians 246 hours, Chileans have 41 hours in the same period.
Youth and Social Networks
According to a research by London-based firm GlobalWebIndex, which analyzed data from 45 of the world’s largest internet markets, the time each person spends on social media sites or apps was around 90 minutesperdayon2012, afigurethatrose to 143 today.
In Mexico, screen time was only reduced by four seconds during the first three months of 2019 compared to 2018.
The increase in time spent on social media appears to be driven by its use by a specific demographic: people aged 16-24. They are the ones who spend the most time per day online. GlobalWebIndex recorded their daily social media usage in just under 180 minutes on average in 2018.
Young Argentines between the ages of 16 and 24 have the highest average usage in the world: no less than 257 minutes per day connected daily; for the rest, the younger the population of a country, the longer the general usage time, which is why emerging market countries lead the rankings for “time spent online”.
Brazil and Disinformation and Fake News
Hence the importance that false news or fake news and disinformation acquired, given that due to this prevalence of social networks, traditional media do not have the tools nor currently the authority to counteract them.
According to experts, the battle over what is true or false, who decides and whether to punish offenders and how to do it, is tearing the very fabric of the democracies of different countries. Fake news is seriously eroding the public’s faith in the voting system, especially in countries like Brazil, where this phenomenon is most observed and where it is most feared given that the presidential elections of 2022 are coming soon.
Even by regional standards, Brazil seems to be a special case. Clearly, if the United States was a main battlefield in the global debate over disinformation during its 2020 presidential election, Brazil could be the epicentre of a similar battle in which President Bolsonaro is seeking re-election next year. Fake news tends to thrive more in polarized societies, says Michael Beng Petersen, a professor at Denmark’s Aarhus University and a renowned expert on disinformation. It is not surprising then that Brazil has such a serious problem. Brazilians initially expressed their frustration in a series of popular protests that brought a million people to the streets in 2013. But the main battlefield quickly changed online. Brazilians had already been among the first and most enthusiastic to use social media, adopting Orkut, a platform owned by Google, years earlier. Although Orkut closed in 2014, Brazil today has around 160 million social media users, more than any other country outside Asia except the United States. Brazilians also spend more time on social media than in any other country except the Philippines, according to a digital report by “We Are Social”, a marketing agency, and Hootsuite, a social media management platform.
In the midst of it all, Jair Bolsonaro arrived as a candidate for the presidency; both in that period and today, many analysts consider it impossible to imagine the rise of the current President of Brazil without the help of social networks. As the traditional Brazilian media and politicians closed their doors to him and condemned his controversial sayings, an increasingly loyal audience emerged
online. “It’s as if (Bolsonaro) knows what words to say to reproduce the algorithm.” Even today, his followers tend to see social media as the central pillar of their power and popularity. They believe that without him, the public debate would be monopolized by newspapers, magazines and traditional stations such as O Globo, which have constantly questioned or opposed the rhetoric of the Head of Government. This helps explain why any attempt to regulate social media generates such immediate and fierce opposition among many Bolsonaristas.
Situation of the Rest of Latin America
But this is not a problem only in Brazil. The question of how to deal with the tide of misinformation, without restricting essential freedoms, poses an extraordinarily difficult dilemma for all of Latin America for legislators, technology companies, the judicial system, with no easy solutions in sight.
Latin America has one of the highest social media usage rates in the world, and one of the lowest levels of trust in government and other institutions, making many countries especially fertile ground for fake news. In Colombia earlier this year, false reports of police abusing minors were posted on Twitter in an apparent attempt to motivate anti-police sentiment among the millions of anti-government protesters who took to the streets. In Peru, a dubious poll showed the new President, Pedro Castillo, 30 points ahead of Keiko Fujimori, an information that was widely shared on numerous platforms. The elections to be held this year in Chile and next in Colombia and, particularly, in Brazil, will be a litmus test.
The Latin American environment, with low levels of education, makes the general population prone to take as true the misleading or false information that circulates on social networks.
According to a study conducted by the well- known Russian antivirus company based in London, Kaspersky and the organization from market research, Corpa, almost 70 percent of Latin Americans do not know how to detect or are not sure to recognize a false news of a truth on the Internet. According to these organizations, those who least manage to identify a fake news are Peruvians, with 79 percent, followed by Colombians, with 73 percent, and Chileans
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