29 Jun

The tension on social networks on the week before the start of the Convention

por Espacio Público | Chile

Updated 2 de July, 2021 at 11:56 am

This week, a few days before the first session of the Constituent Convention at the old National Congress building, the conversation on Twitter about the constituent process was marked by the tender for the security of the Convention, budgets, and the unmet demands of the constituents of the indigenous peoples of Mapuche, Aymara and Chango.

Between June 21 and June 29 (168 hours of data), 89,900 tweets related to our seach were published. 71,800 were retweets (80%) and 6,500 were replies to other tweets (7%).

The tweet with the highest number of retweets was made by Ciper about the tender won by ICAR Seguridad for the vigilance and security service for the Constituent Convention. The reason for the controversy included two important elements. First, the company is directed by a former carabineer who was a member of the Presidential Guard Group during the dictatorship and during Patricio Aylwin’s mandate. Second, the budget allocation for security is similar to the budget allocation for citizen participation (488 million pesos and 500 million pesos, respectively).

Text in the tweet: Tender grant: the security for the Constitutional Convention will be lead by a former member of Pinochet’s and Aylwin’s presidential guard.
The company has 197 DT (Directory of Work) sanctions and will charge almost the same value for “citizen participation”.

This week, the account with the most connections was Ciper, followed by the elected constituent Teresa Marinovic, Claudio Nash, the journalist Alejandra Matus, and the elected constituent Mauricio Daza.

Another controversial topic was the demand for the resignation of the Executive Secretary of the Administrative Secretariat Unit of the Constituent Convention, Francisco Encina, for not complying with the individual and collective demands made to the Segpres (Ministry General Secretariat of the Presidency) by the constituents of the native peoples. Some of the requirements are specific for the inauguration ceremony, and others apply to the Convention in general.

The concept cloud with the most frequent words used in the publications shows the major topics in the conversation on the social network. The words “security”, “guard”, “tender”, “company”, “budget”, “allocation”, “granted”, “secretary”, “millions”, “pinochet”, and “aylwin” are related to Ciper’s comment about the security tender and the criticism of the budget.

The Executive Secretary of the Administrative Secretariat Unit of the Constituent Convention, Francisco Encina, appeared as a relevant actors for the first time in the analysis of the Digital Debate. A lot of the criticism against the organization of the Convention was directed at him, and he appeared in the communities map built using the search results inside his own community, but with no significant reach compared to the other communities. The rest of the accounts with the most connections on the map are clearly distributed among the left-wing and right-wing sides.

 

Methodological Note:

“pueblos originarios” OR Constituyent* OR Constitucional* OR Constitucio* OR Convencion* OR #ConvencionConstitu* OR #procesoconstitu* OR #nuevaconstituci* OR #Constituc* -acusa*

This week, the search terms included the concept of “native peoples”, given the debate that happened about the conditions which their representatives requested of the government in the context of the Convention. In addition, since the constitutional accusation against the Minister of Health, Enrique Paris, was not related to the debate about the Constitutional Convention, the term “accus*” was removed from the search.

* The Digital Democracy Room is a project of FGV DAPP in Brazil in partnership with Chequeado, Espacio Público, Linterna Verde and Ojo Público. It’s goal is to monitor and analyze the digital conversations regarding the electoral context.

The analysis is available the website of Espacio Público here.