Picture taken by Jonathan Acuña at The British Museum, London, England (2018)

Connecting to a Bigger Picture

Who’s really listening in social media?

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.

Head of Curriculum Development Senior Language Professor

Academic Department School of English
Centro Cultural Costarricense- Faculty of Social Sciences
Norteamericano Universidad Latina de Costa Rica

Thursday, July 30, 2020

Post 354

Social media is being used for numerous

reasons. It is not just a place where an individual
is torn apart between his personal online self and
his professional persona; it goes beyond this point.
Social media is also used by corporations, and
even by people in the government to sway
people’s opinions and course of actions. But is this
way of seeing social media a full gamut of ways to
gather like-minded individuals to act and behave in willful ways to favor ideas or
political instability?
 Let us take the case of fake news. In my home country, Costa Rica,
congresspeople who do not favor our current government’s policies and ways of
doing things have posted “campaigns” to discredit this presidential administration’s
achievements. When confronted about the fake news he and his brother had
published on their webpage, congressman Jonathan Prendas defended their
publication of the news regarding the increase in the current sales tax in the
country from 13% to 16% (Sequeira & Chinchilla, 2019), something that was not
true.

Prendas’s news became viral and was then shared multiple times through
different social media sites, and people started a wrestling match in earnest
against the government and the approval of this new law. The question that
remains unanswered is, “why did Congressman Prendas, being a member of a
political party with a Protestant creed and religious affiliation, lie and induce others
to error?” Part of the answer is that congresspeople know the power behind social
media and try to exercise their influence as public, political figures. The cunning,
immoral, and covetous intentions of the powerful can manipulate the mass to act,
usually in their favor, even when a lie is contradicting the facts.

Now let us take the case of a marketing corporation behind a political

campaign. My second example is related to the 2014 presidential election in Costa
Rica. The winner, President Luis Guillermo Solís, had jointly worked with a
marketing corporation that profit from their listening to the social media platforms
used by voters in Costa Rica. Though the losing political party, whose candidate
was Johnny Araya, all were cast down by the electoral defeat; they all
underestimated the power exercised by the marketing corporation on all social
networks to discredit Araya.
 Araya’s ideas, projects, and political campaign promises were deemed to be
inappropriate for the country and exclusive because the poor, the needy, and the
middle class were going to be highly affected. Understanding his defeat, Araya
stepped out of his running for the presidency (DW Akademie, 2014). Had voters
read and understood Araya’s potential government program and path? Probably
not, but influencers in social media paid by Solís’s campaign team strengthened
the dire repercussions of Araya’s future actions if he got elected. Unethically or
not, emotional contagion was used, and Araya’s dream to get elected president of
Costa Rica evaporated into the ethersphere.

One thing is certain so far, corporations and people in governmental

positions do listen to social media and quickly identify the trends in it, or they
create those trends. If this is a sign that we are experiencing a greater connection
to society, well it is happening, but this is not a two-way street, at least in a Latin
American context. We have also understood that fake news can come from all sort
of sources, even with spiteful intentions to discredit positive achievements in the
government. Aside from this, we can also see that a political campaign can be
taken to the social media platforms to sway people’s voting intentions. We are
confronted with interesting ethical issues that were never, ever considered when
social media were born in the world.

References
DW Akademie. (2014, March 5). Johnny Araya abandona la segunda vuelta en las elecciones
presidenciales de Costa Rica. Germany. Retrieved July 30, 2020, from
https://www.dw.com/es/johnny-araya-abandona-la-segunda-vuelta-en-las-elecciones-
presidenciales-de-costa-rica/a-17478248

Sequeira, A., & Chinchilla, S. (2019, July 31). Jonathan Prendas defiende noticia falsa sobre alza
del IVA en sitio web ligado a él. San José, Costa Rica. Retrieved July 30, 2020, from
https://www.nacion.com/el-pais/politica/jonathan-prendas-defiende-noticia-falsa-sobre-
alza/REH5KMKUOJC43HKI6HOFPUTVYE/story/