Cyber Hate from Reasons to Emotions: Influencers and the Colombian Virtual Agora

The agora was among the Greeks the space for democratic participation. Although it was reserved for a few, the truth is that it was a space in which those who could participate in the government of State affairs could make their opinion be heard. In modernity, the space for participation in democratic life was the public sphere, as opposed to the private sphere, to which women and racialized subjects were confined. However, social mobilization was gradually expanding the public sphere, so that the excluded subjects were included, at least as subjects of the law, although not in such a way that they could have access to full citizenship. The Media were characterized by being the space in which political discussion took place, but always under the model of representation. Thus, the model of representative democracy was followed by the model of representative opinion, that is, writers who represented certain groups or certain interests and contributed their ideas to the shaping of public opinion. With the emergence of the internet era, it seemed that a democratic public sphere was emerging. Platforms like Twitter seemed conceived as spaces for the promotion of ideas and rational discussion. Others, like YouTube, were advertising-free spaces, originally, and just for sharing videos. However, with the introduction of advertising on YouTube and the emergence of new social networks such as Tik-Tok or Instagram, rational discussion gave way to negative emotions, to gain followers. Within the model of discussion that arises from social networks we find the influencer. That is, that person who uses social networks to express his/her opinion or to show him/herself, so that s/he has more and more followers. The idea of a public sphere could not be far from these developments, and influencers emerged in political life to use hate speech to disqualify their political rivals and, incidentally, increase the number of followers. In this chapter, I want to analyze the role that influencers have played in the 2022 Colombian presidential elections and how they contributed to moving the debate from reason to negative emotions. For this we will use the analysis of the tweets published by two the influencers of the two candidates who went to the second round and how they appealed to the negative emotions of their followers and not to the rational analysis of their proposals.