JUNE 2013
Mexicans turn to social media to report on drug war
AFP
Mexico City, June 26, 2013
They tweet and blog about street gunfights and murders in Mexican regions plagued by the drug war, keeping people informed about gangland crimes which local newspapers are too afraid to report on. With traditional media often intimidated by drug cartels, social media has given Mexicans a
way to stay appraised about the dangers lurking in their towns and cities.
“They are killing like crazy! There’s a shootout in the Lazaro Cardenas neighborhood. Steer clear of that area,” read a warning tweeted by a writer in the northern city of Monterrey, the country’s industrial heart now beset by drug violence.
Monterrey, which has found itself caught in the crossfire in a turf war between the Zetas and the Gulf cartel, is just one city where reporting on drug crime is moving to social media.
Mexican police shows to the press drug and weapons seized presented to the press in Mexico City.
Analysts from Microsoft.com, led by Mexican researcher Andres Monroy Hernandez, followed for 16 months the Twitter activity of people in Monterrey, Reynosa, Saltillo and Veracruz – all cities heavily affected by drug cartels.
Their report, “The New War Correspondents: The rise of civic media curation in urban warfare,” noted a prevalence of words like “bomb blasts,” “gunshots” and “gunmen” on the microblogging site between August 2010 and November 2011.
Just one-third of Mexicans have access to the Internet, and only 20% of them write daily on Twitter.