Browsing by Author "Santos, Marcelo"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    ¿Contenido o datos generados por el usuario? Las dinámicas (in)voluntarias de generación de contenido en línea
    (2025) Santos, Marcelo; Román Aponte, Luján
    La creciente datificación y la generación involuntaria de datos simplemente por interactuar, con distintos grados de conciencia, con la diversidad de plataformas sociales digitales, exige una revisión del concepto Contenido Generado por el Usuario (CGU). En este sentido, se propone el concepto de Datos Generados por el Usuario (DGU), basado en una idea frecuentemente usada pero escasamente discutida en la literatura académica, y se aborda de qué manera los rastros digitales dejados por los usuarios son capturados y procesados por terceros. A continuación, se realiza una crítica que distingue y delimita las nociones de DGU y la definición de CGU, sosteniendo que constituyen dos ramas de investigación distintas a partir de las cuales se puede pensar la generación de contenido en línea.
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    Detection and impact estimation of social bots in the Chilean Twitter network
    (2024) Mendoza Rocha, Marcelo; Providel, Eliana; Santos, Marcelo; Valenzuela, Sebastián
    The rise of bots that mimic human behavior represents one of the most pressing threats to healthy information environments on social media. Many bots are designed to increase the visibility of low-quality content, spread misinformation, and artificially boost the reach of brands and politicians. These bots can also disrupt civic action coordination, such as by flooding a hashtag with spam and undermining political mobilization. Social media platforms have recognized these malicious bots’ risks and implemented strict policies and protocols to block automated accounts. However, effective bot detection methods for Spanish are still in their early stages. Many studies and tools used for Spanish are based on English-language models and lack performance evaluations in Spanish. In response to this need, we have developed a method for detecting bots in Spanish called Botcheck. Botcheck was trained on a collection of Spanish-language accounts annotated in Twibot-20, a large-scale dataset featuring thousands of accounts annotated by humans in various languages. We evaluated Botcheck’s performance on a large set of labeled accounts and found that it outperforms other competitive methods, including deep learning-based methods. As a case study, we used Botcheck to analyze the 2021 Chilean Presidential elections and discovered evidence of bot account intervention during the electoral term. In addition, we conducted an external validation of the accounts detected by Botcheck in the case study and found our method to be highly effective. We have also observed differences in behavior among the bots that are following the social media accounts of official presidential candidates.
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    Estallido social y despertar conservador: tácticas antidemocráticas y contraofensiva digital en Chile
    (2025) Santos, Marcelo; Valdebenito Allendes, Jorge
    Este artículo analiza la radicalización de las posiciones políticas de corte conservador en Chile tras la irrupción del estallido social de 2019, lo que llamamos despertar conservador. Tras la crisis ante lo que pareciera ser un inminente avance del progresismo durante y en los primeros años después del estallido social, se observa un reempoderamiento de las fuerzas conservadoras en el país que adoptan repertorios de acción ya empleados anteriormente, pero también otros innovadores para defender sus intereses. En particular, este estudio pone foco en las tácticas de autopreservación de las élites políticas y económicas mediante el uso de repertorios de acción digitales antidemocráticos, tales como la amplificación inorgánica de apoyo a causas y personas, el sabotaje y amedrentamiento de grupos de coordinación política de sus opositores y la desinformación en plataformas digitales. A través de la revisión de los estudios recientes que se han realizado sobre el tema, se revela un cauce conducente al concepto de despertar conservador, compuesto por un eje político y otro sociotécnico. Se argumenta que estas tácticas constituyen un mecanismo de defensa, e incluso de reversión de avances sociales y valóricos en la perspectiva del progresismo. El fenómeno es entendido como la contraofensiva frente a la ampliación del umbral de concesiones políticas y sociales que se visualizaba en un futuro cercano, con los rumbos que se dibujaban, en el periodo estudiado (2019-2022) para solventar las fisuras sociales evidenciadas con el estallido social.
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    Sherlock-wannabes or when the audience fact-checks. How ideology, education, and alternative media use explain fact-checking behaviors
    (2023) Saldaña Villa, Magdalena Carolina; Santos, Marcelo
    When confronted with suspicious information, the most common advice is to rely on trusted, well-known news media outlets to verify it. However, in a high-choice, fragmented media ecosystem, news readers might easily find a source that confirms what they previously thought about an issue, or debunks reports that challenge their values and beliefs. As such, alternative news outlets might be a feasible venue for citizens to confront cross-cutting information. At the same time, avoiding contrary information or actively seeking different points of view depends on personal characteristics, such as ideology or education. Drawing upon research on selective exposure and confirmation bias, this study observes how alternative news media use, together with people’s education and political ideology, affect citizens’ fact-checking behaviors when encountering challenging information. Results from a two-wave panel study conducted in Chile suggest that ideology plays a role only for the highly educated, who rely on alternative media to fact-check the most when they are closer to the left side of the political spectrum.
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    Social Media and Belief in Misinformation in Mexico: A Case of Maximal Panic, Minimal Effects?
    (2022) Valenzuela Leighton, Sebastián Andrés; Muñoz, Carlos; Santos, Marcelo
    Contrary to popular narratives, it is not clear whether using social media for news increases belief in political misinformation. Several of the most methodologically sound studies find small to nonexistent effects. However, extant research is limited by focusing on few platforms (usually Facebook, Twitter or YouTube) and is heavily U.S. centered. This leaves open the possibility that other platforms, such as those that rely on visual communication (e.g., Instagram) or are tailored to strong-tie network communication (e.g., WhatsApp), are more influential. Furthermore, the few studies conducted in other countries suggest that social media use increases political misperceptions. Still, these works use cross-sectional designs, which are ill suited to dealing with omitted variable bias and temporal ordering of processes. Using a two-wave survey fielded in Mexico during the 2021 midterm elections (N = 596), we estimate the relationship between frequency of news exposure on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp, and belief in political misinformation, while controlling for both time-invariant and time-dependent individual differences. In contrast to political discussion, information literacy and digital skills, none of the social platforms analyzed exhibits a significant association with misinformed beliefs. We also tested for possible indirect, moderated, and reciprocal relationships, but none of these analyses yielded a statistically significant result. We conclude that the study is consistent with the “minimal media effects” paradigm, which suggests that efforts to address misinformation need to go beyond social platforms.
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    Subversive affordances as a form of digital transnational activism: The case of Telegram’s native proxy
    (2021) Santos, Marcelo; Saldaña Villa, Magdalena Carolina; Tsyganova, Ksenia
    Internet, social media, and app shutdowns have become frequent, not only in authoritarian states but also in emerging and fragile democracies. As Russian authorities enforced a legal blockage to Instant Messenger Telegram during the past 2 years, many users kept using the app seamlessly thanks to what we call a subversive affordance: a built-in proxy functionality that allows users to seamlessly circumvent the blockage. We claim it is subversive because it allows users to overcome the blockage as the consequence of the app’s development, with a significant fraction of users who did not have to take action to bypass the blockage. By conducting an online survey and performing a meta-cluster analysis, we found a group we labeled the undeprived: people that, despite presenting traits frequently associated with digital divides—such as gender, age, and low levels of digital skills—were able to keep using the app.
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    The Meso News-Space as a Framework for Studying Mobile Instant Messaging Services
    (2024) Valenzuela, Sebastián; Santos, Marcelo
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    Unsupervised Framing Analysis for Social Media Discourse in Polarizing Events
    (2024) Sarmiento, Hernán; Córdova, Ricardo; Ortiz, Jorge; Bravo Marquez, Felipe; Santos, Marcelo; Valenzuela Leighton, Sebastian Andrés
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