Argentina will vote in a second round on November 19, in which the rejection vote will be decisive. Peronist Sergio Massa, who received 36% of the vote in the first round, and far-right Javier Milei, who came second with 29%, are seeking the presidency after an election that lasted almost six months and featured 27 candidates in the August primaries, and which will now define more than 9.5 million voters (35% of the register) who did not choose either elector in the first round of voting on October 22nd. The hunt for this vote has been fierce in recent weeks: Massa has begun to point out Milei’s program, which even proposes to no longer make health and education public, and the Ultra have formed an alliance with former President Mauricio Macri to oppose the right to ally Peronism. As the political table is rearranged, fake news has been used as cannon fodder for an election that has been relegated to short-form social media videos. The most promoted case from the Milei sector is an unprecedented case in 40 years of democracy in Argentina: the possibility of electoral fraud.
During Milei’s tour of the northern outskirts of Buenos Aires a week ago, everyone interviewed by EL PAÍS was convinced that there was fraud in the October general election. Some cited as an example the viral images of telegrams with errors that damaged La Libertad Avanza and of tables in which this far-right party had not received any votes. Others, however, appealed to what they considered common sense. “In Lomas de Zamora, with the yacht scandal [el exjefe de Gabinete bonaerense Martín] For example, do you think Peronism could win without cheating? There was fraud,” said Antonia, a retiree who described herself as an “anti-Peronist and anti-corruption.”
From Chequeado, an organization dedicated to the verification of sources and information, they emphasize that “the official data of the preliminary verification show that these inconsistencies affected the five presidential candidates and that they affected only a very small percentage of the tables.” Telegrams serve as a preliminary check and have information value, but no legal validity. “Errors in the telegrams can be corrected during the final review,” they add. The difference between the preliminary data and the final data was small and the gap of almost seven points between Massa and Milei was maintained.
Anti-Mili and pro-abortion posters on Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires in September. Anita Pouchard Serra (Bloomberg)
“We’re concerned about misinformation in general, but what’s related to fraud particularly concerns us because it brings with it an enormous level of potential harm that we haven’t seen before,” says Olivia Sohr, director of impact and new Initiatives at Checkaado. Sohr explains that fake news is not innocent, but thoughtful, and is therefore particularly effective when it appeals to the emotions and confirms the beliefs of those who receive it. In this sense, convinced Massa voters are willing to believe distorted information about Milei and vice versa.
The strategy of spreading suspicions of fraud was previously used by Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States to ignore unfavorable election results. Milei is now pointing in the same direction. In a very close scenario in which the polls give him a slight advantage over Massa, the Argentine economist has declared that the October elections were not fair. “There were irregularities of such magnitude that they cast doubt on the outcome,” he replied in an interview with the Peruvian writer Jaime Bayly. Despite the serious public allegations, the La Libertad Avanza team has not filed a formal complaint with Argentina’s electoral court.
Doubts about the verification, along with other fake news, are increasing on social networks such as TikTok, YouTube or X (formerly Twitter), where almost a third of Argentine voters under 29 are informed.
While Mauricio Macri became “the president of Facebook” in 2015 because he supported his presidential victory through his presence on this social network, today Milei is the candidate of networks, especially audiovisual ones. “The parties linked to the right around the world occupy a special place on social networks. In Argentina, this is the case with La Libertad Avanza and its leader Javier Milei,” said Ana Slimovich, doctor of social sciences and researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council, in a conversation with this newspaper about Milei’s influence on the new networks. For the researcher, its impact comes from the fact that its proponents “construct speeches using simple language that is not technical and addresses both positive and negative emotions.”
Posters criticizing Milei’s proposals in Buenos Aires on September 29th. Anita Pouchard Serra (Bloomberg)
But Milei’s presence in networks does not only depend on himself. From their party they assure that “90% of the content is produced ad honorem”: La Libertad Avanza employs fifteen people working on the digital strategy, almost six times less than Peronism, and it relies on a lot of videos and tweets published by Militants are produced by self-governors. . YouTube is the best example: Milei’s official account has almost 300,000 followers, but autonomous activists who limit their television interventions in order to spread it, such as the account @elpelucamilei, have more than a million.
The inorganic proponents of mileism are mainly found on X (formerly Twitter), where the topic of the week was a doctored video showing Sergio Massa taking cocaine. The original video, which shows a man taking drugs on camera, has been circulating online since at least 2016, but the version edited with Massa’s face and voice has racked up three million views on Facebook, X and TikTok in recent days. It has been debunked and analyzed, but Milei fighters, who reach hundreds of thousands of X users, are still trying to spread the idea that Massa is a cocaine addict who is unfit to govern.
It’s part of the mud of a hard-fought battle. Since October 23 last year, the day after the first round of voting, 22 polls have been published showing a close result regardless of the winner. Milei wins 15 of them, but the results vary between him winning by just two tenths and Massa winning by seven points. The survey published on November 10 by the Latin American Strategic Center for Geopolitics (CELAG) gives some clues as to where the choice is defined: respondents agree that politicians are the social actors they distrust the most, but the majority agrees admits that a traditional politician like Massa, who has worked in the state for more than 20 years, is better prepared to govern, has a greater capacity for dialogue than Milei and is “closer to the common people”. For his part, Milei is seen as more capable of dealing with the economic crisis, but is also the candidate who scares respondents the most due to his instability and his proposals for cuts in health, education, pensions and social services.
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