FOPEA recommended “investigating” social media users for expressing themselves freely

The Argentine Journalism Forum (FOPEA) recently published its report “Insult as a Strategy” with a final block on the "15 recommendations" to be handled on social networks, presented as a guide for journalists and users.

The document was prepared with financial support from the Embassy of Switzerland in Argentina and proposes a series of behaviors to face what the organization calls a climate of polarization and insults in the digital environment.

However, several of his points generated controversy because of their openly political and authoritarian content, proposing to "investigate" ordinary citizens simply for the sake of expressing themselves freely.

The forum suggests keeping calm in the face of insults, not interacting with “anonymous accounts” and not reposting or citing those who offend, so as not to amplify the effect

.

But the document doesn't stop there. Among the recommendations, there is one that can hardly be read as technical advice: “cover the people's agenda and not the government's agenda

”.

The phrase, included in an institutional report by an entity that presents itself as “independent” and plural, is equivalent to telling journalists what to ignore and what to prioritize, something that, paradoxically, is exactly what FOPEA accuses the Government of Javier Milei of trying to do with the press.

The most authoritative point in the report is one that asks “to investigate trolls and their propaganda apparatus”. The recommendation presupposes the existence of a coordinated and dark machinery, ignoring the existence of thousands of real people who simply decide to share content on a social network, exercising their

freedom of expression.

Proposing that “research” be “investigated” for that reason is not a recommendation, but an invitation to persecute citizens for their opinions

.

The entity, which receives funding from foreign embassies, also admits in the body of the report that X has just 7 million users in a country with 35 million voters and that “the reach of trolls is waiting to be measured”. In other words, FOPEA constructs a narrative of democratic emergency based on a phenomenon whose real impact it recognizes that it cannot measure

.

In this way, an organization that presents itself as the guardian of press freedom and pluralism, publishes a report funded from abroad, with biased political conclusions, which tells the press what to cover and proposes to persecute those who think differently.