PABLO IGLESIAS HOW TO
PABLO IGLESIAS PROFESSIONAL

And I have seen that, indeed, they are an issue that is becoming increasingly important to the research community. That is why in my more, let's say, militant work, I have always emphasized that the media are an object of research in themselves.

PABLO IGLESIAS HOW TO

In the same way, we must educate society so people are alert and know how to relate to the media and social networks and protect themselves. A trained researcher can identify junk and propaganda and knows how to detect sources that are really useful for research. People must be given sufficient cultural, political and media training to be able to protect themselves against lies. The only viable mechanism is media education. What effective control mechanisms would you suggest to prevent the spread of hate speech and fake news? And that optimism for democracy that researchers had fifteen years ago has not been matched by events. Though we must acknowledge that social networks such as Twitter, which has been the subject of much discussion following its acquisition by Elon Musk, have turned into a kind of repository for hatred. But watch out! Fake news is not only found in social media, it is also on television and in newspapers. What has happened is that there has, indeed, been a certain amount of democratization, but the internet has, at the same time, become a deeply toxic place where lies proliferate.

This made us think that in the future new technologies would be able to democratize spaces that had previously been monopolized by the mass media or by structures such as political parties. What happened on 13 March 2004 at the PP's headquarters was different: a well-designed message was put out, each recipient had to decide if they could trust the sender of that message and whether to forward it on, putting their own credibility and prestige on the line to spread the message. But in that case it was a political party that, from above, instructed its cells to mobilize to call for the release of their leader. I compared that demonstration with the one that took place at the Directorate-General of Security after the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Spain, Santiago Carrillo, was arrested during the Spanish transition to democracy. We were intrigued by how a text message (there was no WhatsApp or Telegram in those days) could produce what we call a hot connection, and a major political protest could be mobilized with no hierarchical structure to direct it. The buzzword among the researchers studying social mobilization and collective action was the tactic known as swarming. In my PhD thesis I studied, for example, the demonstrations that took place outside the headquarters of the People's Party (Partido Popular, PP) the day after the 11 March attacks in Madrid. At that time, were social media better at ensuring truthfulness and controlling fake news and hate speech than they are today?īack then, some researchers, including me, felt very optimistic about the social network concept. The 2012 Arab Spring and, closer to home, the 15-M Movement (the anti-austerity movement) in 2011 relied precisely on these new channels to spread certain anti-system messages. In your doctoral research, you referred to social networks and the internet as 'a great hope for democratization', an opportunity for citizen participation to compete with the major media powers for control of information. I've got to know a different type of university, where I have carried out my own research project as part of a group with a high level of understanding of the role of new technologies in politics and sociology.

PABLO IGLESIAS PROFESSIONAL

It's been a fascinating, fruitful and enriching professional opportunity. What has it meant for you to work with the CNSC research group at the UOC's Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) ? In this interview, we discussed the conclusions of his research with him. What can we do to combat them? Iglesias believes the only way is through education. Social networks were initially welcomed as a tool that could democratize public participation in the way information is controlled and disseminated, but they have turned into a forum where hatred and fake news proliferate. Iglesias argues that lies have become an established way to catalyse certain forms of political activism, emphasising that desire and pleasure play an important role in driving political ideology and generating hate speech. The former Spanish deputy prime minister and leader of Podemos analysed the far-right ideas that circulate on social media, how they reach and impact users, and how they define political discourse. Last year, Pablo Iglesias completed his period as a researcher at the UOC. Pablo Iglesias, former Deputy Prime Minister of Spain, founder of the Podemos political party and researcher with the UOC's IN3 CNSC group (2021-2022)

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