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Mexico's Social Media Laws



Here in the United States we have pretty much total freedom on our social media accounts and whatever we want to view.  In June of 2017 Mexico had around 85 million social media user and has grown by 27% throughout the years. Internet users in Mexico on average are spending about 3.5 hour a day on their social media. They are also Facebook's 5th largest market in the entire world. With that being said I wanted to look into Mexico's overall freedom on social media where their status was marked as 'partly free' as they still face limits on their content.

 Now even though they are considered to be partly free they do not have freedom of press and bloggers are arrested and even given jail time for their opinions posted online. Over the years their freedom on social media has steadily increased but began to backtrack in 2017 when government spyware became a large concern. With this spyware the internet and social media became a rather scary place to be voicing your opinions could result in major cyberattacks or even death. Now the threat wasn't as there for social media users but more risk for journalists on their post. However a huge rise in gas prices began to stir up some trouble as post on social media targeted the government raised some concern.  With the war on drugs in Mexico being at an all time high the government took this as an opportunity to increase their power and overall control over the internet. Their government claims that they have "Appropriate Authority" over the web and how citizens use it.

So unlike the United States the President of Mexico hosts a conference everyday but Saturday and Sunday. However, the journalists who attend these conferences have rules they have to follow when asking questions or just attending. Each reporter is allowed two questions and that is it. The country is said to heavily benefit by posting and discussing these conferences through their social media platforms. Now they still face some censorship of course as the country is only partly free some journalists are heavily penalized or even prohibited for discussing business of the government online.



The heavy surveillance hasn't really affected the community of social media users as a survey done asking how often they were using social media. When asked 98% of them said they used some form of social media and owned an account. The majority used Facebook like I mentioned early the country is in the top five for the market in Facebook.  The least used form of social media was Instagram with only 24% owning an account and only 8% had used it in the last month. Of course Twitter was a top social media platform being used but one that surprised me is LinkedIn was ranked above Instagram. Maybe some of these other popular social media platforms would be used more if there was more freedom and no threats with posting.

Overall I don't think we really think about how different countries have rules on what they can and can't post. I know I don't ever think about restrictions when I'm posting things I couldn't imagine not having freedom to post what I wanted. Things like Facebook don't have any restrictions on what we can discuss like our views on politics and certain issues our country faces. Countries like Mexico that is certainly not the case, and we need to start thinking about how lucky we are to have freedom on our social media platforms.


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