On August 11, Mexico’s election authority made an unexpected announcement via its official account on X, formerly known as Twitter: It called for Ricardo Salinas Pliego, Mexico’s third-richest man, to delete 70 of his posts on the platform. The posts were part of an ongoing social media feud in which Salinas Pliego has often bullied and body-shamed Mexican politician Citlalli Hernández. What might have once been a simple case of enforcing X’s community guidelines now has experts worrying that the Mexican state might turn its electoral authority into a tool to censor social media.
Salinas Pliego refused to comply with the election authority’s order and pushed back in a series of posts. “Are they telling me that from now on, the INE [Instituto Nacional Electoral] will tell us Mexicans what to do on our social media?,” he posted after the announcement. On August 16, Salinas Pliego formally challenged the INE’s resolution in the country’s electoral court.
The feud between Salinas Pliego and Hernández, a senator for Mexico’s ruling party, has been raging for years, with the media mogul often resorting to body-shaming to harass Hernández and calling on his 1.5 million followers to do the same. His account was briefly suspended in early 2022 for not following community standards. But Hernández’s team told Rest of World that in recent months, Salinas Pliego’s attacks on the senator have increased — and X, whose Mexican moderation team was dismantled last November, has done nothing to stop them.
While Brazil and Vietnam have controversial but explicit laws that empower the government to take action regarding undesirable content on social media, Mexico does not. So, in her search for a way to stop Salinas Pliego from targeting her on X, Hernández came across an ambiguous law which allowed electoral authorities to prosecute instances of gender violence in political debate.
Before Elon Musk took over the company, Twitter’s moderation team worked alongside local experts to identify and shut down abusive accounts. Though the process was often criticized for being slow — with users highlighting a particular slowness when it came to moderating harassment of women — action was taken.
Though many of X’s community guidelines have remained unchanged since the moderation team was dismantled — the platform still prohibits abuse or harassment — there is little proof that they are enforced internally. “The tweets have been formally and repeatedly reported on X by us and other users, but the company has not taken them down,” Aidée García, Hernández’s press secretary, told Rest of World.
“Are they telling me that from now on, the INE will tell us Mexicans what to do on our social media?“
Given that INE’s requests to Salinas Pliego have been rebuffed, the electoral court will now have to decide whether harassment by a private individual against a politician on social media falls within this definition. If the court sides with the INE, Salinas Pliego will be “fined or otherwise admonished,” according to electoral law. But many, including those critical of Salinas Pliego’s treatment of Hernández, worry that a ruling against Salinas Pliego could set a precedent to use these laws — often not drafted with social media in mind — to silence online criticism.
“[Hernández] is a victim, but she’s also politicizing the vacuum created by the platform,” Fernando Barrientos del Monte, a political science researcher and professor at the University of Guanajuato, told Rest of World. “The problem is that if [the court sides with her], the tribunal would be opening a Pandora’s box in which all politicians who dislike online criticism will ask for sanctions … It’s something that should have been determined by the platform itself.”
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