Harry Styles experienced a night time to keep in mind. Not only did he take home two Grammy Awards on Sunday evening, but he also served up some of the ceremony’s most talked-about outfits.
The previous A person Route star began the night in a plunging technicolor jumpsuit that revealed a collection of butterfly and fowl tattoos on his otherwise bare upper body. The vibrant harlequin sample was brought to lifestyle by Swarovski crystals, though the legs of the sparkling garment flared out in excess of a pair of white boots.
Harry Variations in a rainbow-coloured harlequin jumpsuit by Egonlab and Swarovski. Credit rating: Amy Sussman/Getty Visuals
Even though Types typically opts for red-carpet looks — and without a doubt jumpsuits — by Italian label Gucci, this just one was intended by Egonlab, an rising French manufacturer regarded for its genderless creations.
The outfit divided social media, with comments ranging from “he can pretty much dress in anything at all” to “appears to be like he forgot the jacket.” Some others dubbed the look an illustration of “clowncore,” while the singer also drew comparisons — the two favorable and disparaging — to two of Britain’s most flamboyant pop icons: Elton John and David Bowie.
Jumpsuits have turn into a little something of a signature glance for Models, who consistently wore them on phase through his Enjoy On Tour. It was no shock, hence, that he experienced a next a single all set for his much-anticipated Grammys efficiency.
Harry Styles in jumpsuit quantity two as he performs “As it Was.” Credit: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
Using the stage for a rendition of strike track “As It Was” (which you may possibly bear in mind showcased a online video of the singer donning a — you guessed it — sequined purple jumpsuit), the star opted for a considerably less revealing, even though no significantly less exuberant, selection.
The overall performance drew a standing ovation from Taylor Swift, and his silver fringed structure gained plaudits online, too, although Twitter customers also when compared it to a embellished Xmas tree and a pair of metallic fringe curtains.
Harry Kinds accepts the Very best Pop Vocal Album award for “Harry’s House.” Credit: JC Olivera/WireImage/Getty Pictures
Variations, who is recognized for daring and gender-fluid manner, opted for a little something a lot more official to collect his awards. Getting the stage to scoop up the coveted Album of the 12 months and Greatest Pop Vocal Album for “Harry’s Residence,” he appeared dapper in a cropped white accommodate jacket and wide-legged tan-colored trousers.
Even then, he couldn’t assistance but deliver some sparkle to the outfit in a shimmering reduced-lower top.
There’s a moment early in the first episode of Netflix’s behind-the-scenes tennis show Break Point at which 22-year-old Costeen Hatzi, current girlfriend of the Australian ace Nick Kyrgios, laughingly admits that she has never watched a tennis match in her life. “This is all new for me,” she says.
In this respect she is a mirror image of the viewer that the streaming service, and indeed tennis itself, wants to attract. Sports television has long been the preserve of dedicated fans, the kind of people who can reel off scores, records, statistics, and tend to be what James Gay-Rees, the award-winning British producer of Break Point, calls “a male, pale and stale demographic”.
Although that particular tribe of enthusiasts is firmly established in their armchairs, they are getting older, and the challenge for many sports is to draw a more youthful audience, the kind of people whose main experience of TV is to watch shows such as Love Island and The Traitors.
Now a whole range of sports reality TV shows is on the way. There’s one documenting this year’s rugby union Six Nations championship, due to be screened next year. Full Swing, which follows top golfers through a season, is out this month, and there will also be behind-the-scenes TV series on the 2022 Fifa World Cup, the Tour de France and the Invictus Games.
“There’s an appetite among audiences to go beyond the broadcast version of sport,” says Gay-Rees, who also produced the groundbreaking Senna about Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna, and Netflix’s Formula One series Drive to Survive, which returns this month for its fifth season. “There’s a massive curiosity about elite athletes and a desire to understand sport in a different way, to see the personal investment by going behind the curtain.”
Younger audiences are also more plugged into social media platforms, where personality is marketed as celebrity, and celebrities aspire to the status of brands.
At the upper end of the scale, the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has 542 million followers on Instagram. It’s been estimated that he earns £1.65m a post, which means over £82.5m a year. But even Kyrgios’s girlfriend, Hatzi, who has become a beauty influencer, now has 172,000 followers on the same platform. She has benefited from the 3.3 million followers who make Kyrgios one of the most followed tennis players, despite being ranked only 20th in the world.
Formula One’s Lewis Hamilton in Netflix’s Drive to Survive. Photograph: Netflix
Ronaldo owes his celebrity to his ability, but there are signs that personality could start to trump performance. Until now, sport has been well served by expert TV coverage. But the unsqueezed dramatic juice is now thought to lie in the surrounding personal stories, the lives outside the competition.
In some ways the career of David Beckham was a harbinger of these developments. While never the most talented footballer in the UK, he became arguably the most famous player in the world due to the way he projected a carefully curated image. It’s this increasing image-awareness that also brought us the Premier League series All or Nothing on Amazon Prime. In taking cameras into the previously sacrosanct dressing rooms of Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal, the show exposed the kind of conflicts that have traditionally been hidden from public view, as well as shots of footballers’ high-performance cars and expensive home interiors. Most of all, it offered a glimpse of athletes away from the cliches of after-match interviews.
In the US, where the trend is more advanced, everything from American football and cheerleading through to surfing (season two of Make or Break debuts on Apple TV+ this month) has received the reality TV treatment. It’s also the market where Drive to Survive has been credited with opening up F1 to a wider and younger audience. TV ratings for the sport were up 40{515baef3fee8ea94d67a98a2b336e0215adf67d225b0e21a4f5c9b13e8fbd502} by 2021. The show effectively removed the opaque helmets from the drivers and introduced their high-pressure, if luxurious, lifestyles to a new generation of viewers.
“We’ve given drivers their identities,” Ross Brawn, F1’s former managing director, said. “And that’s been enhanced by Drive to Survive, which has really focused on the personalities.”
Some participants, such as the fiercely competitive but often thwarted Australian Daniel Ricciardo, the former McLaren driver, proved to be naturals in front of the camera. And previously shadowy figures – such as team principals Toto Wolff of Mercedes and Red Bull’s Christian Horner – were placed centre stage in an intriguing battle of wills and machinations.
“I think it’s got to be the single most important impact for F1 in North America,” Zak Brown, the chief executive of McLaren Racing, said.
Golfer Brooks Koepka practising at home in Netflix’s Full Swing. Photograph: Netflix
Initially the two biggest teams, Mercedes and Ferrari, refused to participate in the programme – F1 is a notoriously secretive sport in which the standard mode of communication is paranoia – but relented when they saw the viewing figures.
Still, a number of drivers and team managers have voiced concerns about the way the action is edited to create false rivalries and tensions – as if, without the cameras, all is usually peace and harmony in the paddock. A more serious accusation is that, in ramping up the drama, the coverage affected the outcome of competition.
At the end of the 2021 season, the driver’s championship was controversially settled on the last lap of the Abu Dhabi grand prix after a decision by race director Michael Masi to order a restart that did not follow the rules. The call robbed Lewis Hamilton of almost certain victory and some observers felt that the F1 hierarchy had been swayed by the need for a suitable TV denouement.
“It was obviously made to be a fight, it was for the TV of course,” said McLaren driver Lando Norris after Max Verstappen, amid confusion and appeals, edged out Hamilton to claim the title.
Gay-Rees quickly dismisses the idea. “I think [Masi] was just under a lot of pressure and got things slightly wrong. I don’t think he was thinking ‘What does Netflix want?’”
Yet Gay-Rees does believe that the barriers between sporting action and the stories that envelop it are destined to be broken down in the future by more comprehensive television coverage.
“I think you will see a divergence of broadcast strategies that will make the experience less siloed and more fluid,” he says. “As the narrative develops, the documentary piece and the live piece will become more integrated.”
If shows such as Drive to Survive and Break Point are the first steps in that process, it’s noticeable that different shows about the same sport are spread across different broadcasters. For example, F1 is shown on Sky Sports but Drive to Survive is on Netflix. Similarly, Break Point, which focuses on the generation of players struggling to emerge from the long shadow of Roger Federer and Serena Williams, is on Netflix, but tennis matches are shared between its streaming rival Amazon Prime and Eurosport, with the BBC monopolising Wimbledon.
Tennis player Nick Kyrgios in Netflix’s Break Point. Photograph: Netflix
The early signs are that the integrated experience is enduring some teething problems. The first five episodes of Break Point were released before the Australian Open in January and featured nine promising younger players and Kyrgios, 27 – a controversial figure on the tennis court who has admitted shoving his ex-girlfriend Chiara Passari in Canberra in 2021, but avoided a criminal conviction.
Not one of the nine went beyond the fourth round, with most either injured – like Kyrgios, who withdrew before his opening match – or going out by the second round. Some observers spoke of “the Netflix Curse”, but the real question is whether participation in a reality TV show has a negative effect on performance. In elite sport, after all, the margins are so fine that any distraction is seen as a threat.
For Blake Friend, who manages Ricciardo, Drive to Survive improved his client’s commercial allure, adding 2 million followers to his Instagram account. “People’s first comments when he meets them are often ‘we saw you on Netflix’,” he said at the end of 2021. Yet it’s worth noting that while Ricciardo was one of the show’s most prominent drivers, he has since lost his place as an F1 competitor and is now only the standby driver at Red Bull.
It’s also hard to imagine serial winners such as F1’s Hamilton or Australian Open champion Novak Djokovic allowing cameras into their hotel rooms in the way that tennis players Matteo Berrettini and his girlfriend, Ajla Tomljanović, do in Break Point. But then, as we come to know these sportspeople in closer and more intimate ways – and Gay-Rees says he receives dozens of offers from sports administrators, teams and individuals wanting the close attention – being a winner may become less important than being a winning personality.
Invoice Maher sounded alarm bells about a failing educational program, warning that college students study “nothing at all” in a modern classroom since society is worried to “stigmatize” them.
On his latest “Club Random” podcast, the host talked to comic Sebastian Maiscalo about the potential risks struggling with his two children, declaring, “I do not know what you feel your kids are mastering in faculty. But I’m pretty much sure it is nothing. I necessarily mean, they do nonetheless instruct them how to read through, scarcely.”
He also lashed out at smartphones and social media, decrying them for “rotting” the brains of youthful folks today.
Maher contrasted what he observed as education right now and his possess.
Monthly bill MAHER SLAMS WOKE School CAMPUSES: ‘THERE IS A ROT, AND IT Will come FROM ACADEMIA’
“They did not let you out the doorway of superior school unless of course you experienced a sort of standard knowing of the planet and our location in it and essential items,” he claimed.
The host mentioned that he labored hard in topics like math and biology because “we have been frightened that if we did not do nicely, there would be horrible repercussions like acquiring still left again.” But in 2023, “They would never use that expression because… ‘Oh my God! You are stigmatizing men and women!’ Sure! I was anxious about staying stigmatized!’”
Maher concluded, “And that was fantastic. It is not poor to be a tiny scared.”
The “Club Random” host, who has no small children himself, prompted Maiscalo: “You should be concerned about what the f—ing cell phone, the portal to evil, and social media and TikTok and how that is rotting – and is rotting the brains of our youth.”
Invoice MAHER SKEWERS WOKE Remaining FOR NOT Comprehending Independence: ‘FREEDOM Must BE A LIBERAL THING’
“True Time” host Bill Maher on the established of his HBO demonstrate. (HBO)
Maiscalo stated that his intention was to retain smartphones away from his kids right until “they get a [drivers] license.” Maher shot back again that these objectives are “likely to be incredibly really hard to keep the line” for dad and mom.
“When that kid goes to faculty and the other little ones have telephones. That’s what I’m speaking about! This is heading to pit you from the horror of exactly where The usa is now with this kind of nonsense,” Maher mentioned.
In December, Maher slammed younger environmentalists for blaming more mature generations.
“You happen to be not driving? Proper. You happen to be just with Greta on a sailboat all the time. You’re applying automobiles as substantially as we did. So, shut the f— up!” he mentioned.
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Photograph of a particular person on TikTok. The application tracks all of your personal information. (Fox Information)
Scott Whitlock is an editor for Fox Information Digital.
The Pac-12’s long, winding road toward long-term security was never supposed to last this long. It is mid-December, and the league still must wait on the conclusion of Wednesday’s University of California system regents meeting to proceed in its media rights negotiations.
Almost six months after news broke of USC and UCLA departing for the Big Ten in 2024, the league still has not reconfigured. While it is considered almost a formality by some that UCLA will ultimately be allowed to join the Big Ten, the regents’ concerns dragging the process out this long has added a layer of skittishness to the proceedings.
“It has significantly impacted the timeline,” Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff said last week at the SportsBusiness Journal Intercollegiate Athletic Forum in Las Vegas. “The regents have delayed a couple of times that decision. We’re not going to do a media rights deal before that decision. So, that puts you in the second half of December. Media takes the second half of December off, as you guys know.”
On Nov. 17, the regents announced a special meeting Wednesday that will result in “a final determination regarding UCLA’s intention to join the Big Ten.” In essence, the Pac-12 can’t proceed until it — and its media rights partners — know who will be part of the league.
A source familiar with the hearings told CBS Sports there is a “2{515baef3fee8ea94d67a98a2b336e0215adf67d225b0e21a4f5c9b13e8fbd502} chance” UCLA is compelled to stay in the Pac-12. And one person intimately involved in the process speculated, if UCLA is forced to stay in the Pac-12, the Big Ten would then poach more teams from the Pac-12 (Oregon? Washington?) in order to fulfill its media rights contract finalized in August. That deal is the highest valued of its kind nationally at $1.2 billion per year.
Either way, what will be left for the Pac-12 in terms of money, visibility and viewership is up for debate. A deal heavy on streaming is expected. The problem with the emerging technology is that streaming giants haven’t fully latched onto live sports programming just yet.
“It’s a demonstrated fact that, when you go from traditional TV to streaming exclusive, you’re going to take a little bit of a haircut,” Fox executive vice president Mike Mulvihill told the SBJ audience last week. “The people on the conference side and the league side who control these rights have to weigh that revenue opportunity that might exist with a streamer against the loss in average viewership.”
CBS Sports already has reported on the implications now that the Pac-12 is last in line among the Power Five conferences to land a media rights deal in this cycle. It will be more about who will see those Pac-12 games beginning in 2024.
One industry source expressed concern over the “depressed” digital market. That may be reference to reports of Amazon and Google laying off tens of thousands of employees in the coming months.
Earlier this year, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos discussed taking a shot at live televised sports: “I’m not saying that we’ll never do sports, but we’ll have to see a path to growing a big revenue stream and a great profit stream with it.”
Industry insiders suggested the Big 12 was able to cut in line ahead of the Pac-12 for its media rights deal because of the depth of the conference without Texas and Oklahoma. Over the last two seasons, Oklahoma State, Baylor, TCU and Kansas State have played in the conference title game.
On the other hand, Pac-12 excellence has been concentrated at the top lately with Oregon and Utah each splitting the last four conference titles. In essence, the value of getting second, third and fourth picks from Big 12 inventory allowed more freedom and profitability than getting smaller Tier 1 (top games) inventory from the Pac-12.
The question remains: Will streaming tech giant go all in on that Pac-12 inventory without USC and UCLA involved? There is no doubt streaming will come in the future. It is where we all are going to consume the majority of televised events in coming years.
But how soon? Coaches and administrators everywhere are concerned about going too heavy into streaming at the moment amid concerns about recruiting and visibility. That’s one reason Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren was urged by members not to pursue California, Oregon, Stanford and Washington earlier this summer.
Mulvihill pointed out that Amazon has capitalized on its “Thursday Night Football” deal with the NFL by getting games televised in the local markets of participating teams. That and NFL infrastructure allows those games to be seen in bars and restaurants.
It is highly doubtful the Pac-12 would allow its streaming content to be seen free on linear TV (cable, broadcast) in local markets. That’s the idea of streaming: gaining subscribers who have to pay a monthly fee.
“If you’re another professional league or college conference and you’re thinking about going streaming exclusive, you’re probably not going to have that distribution,” Mulvihill said. “… It’s going to make a big difference.”
The Pac-12 isn’t expected to go streaming exclusive. In fact, from the beginning, it was thought ESPN would be interested in the Pac-12 to fill a void that exists in its “fourth window” — the late-night broadcast space following primetime games.
The current situation may be resolved by UCLA simply cutting a check to Cal — its UC system partner — each year. UCLA’s all-in figure from the Big Ten may be as much as $100 million annually. In a new deal, the Pac-12 would get significantly less than half that number.
Kliavkoff was among those who suggested, because the Pac-12 is last in line, there is no urgency. (The current deal with ESPN and Fox expires in 2024.) In fact, he said it was an advantage negotiations were delayed this long allowing Deion Sanders to join Colorado.
“He absolutely adds value [to the conference],” Kliavkoff said.
Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark reiterated at SBJ that his conference is interested in expansion. That could be the reported pursuit of a basketball-only deal with Gonzaga or continued interested in Pac-12 schools.
Yormark has expressed a desire to be in all four time zones to enhance his conference’s reach. Either option would satisfy that want.
A Salvadoran twenty-something had been looking for work when an unexpected invitation arrived to sit down with a government official.
It was 2019, and the communications specialist was well-versed in social media. Talks with the official led to a $600-a-month job in the capital of San Salvador working for the communications team of President Nayib Bukele, according to the employment contract seen by Reuters. It was decent money in this poor Central American nation.
“I didn’t know it when I signed the contract, but I made a pact with the devil,” the communications specialist said. “I became a pro-Bukele troll.”
Bukele, founder of the fledgling Nuevas Ideas party, had just won the presidency at age 37 in a landslide. Young voters, in particular, were enthralled by his savvy use of social media. It was a showcase for his carefully crafted persona as a maverick in a backwards baseball cap. Bukele vowed to crack down hard on violent criminal gangs and corruption, and to battle entrenched interests.
“I didn’t know it when I signed the contract, but I made a pact with the devil. I became a pro-Bukele troll.”
That’s where tech-savvy influencers hired by the government came in. Reuters spoke with three former contractors who said they were part of secretive “troll farms” tasked with manipulating El Salvador’s political discourse. Part of their job was ginning up fictitious Bukele supporters on social media to praise his policies, the communications specialist said. The flip side involved insulting the president’s critics and filing complaints about their posts with platforms with the aim of shutting down their accounts.
The three said their work was overseen directly by administration officials, and in some cases took place in government buildings.
Two of these contract employees, including the communications specialist, said they signed non-disclosure agreements. The communications specialist’s agreement, viewed by Reuters, threatened prosecution and a jail term of up to six years for speaking to the press or other political parties about this work.
None of the three are still employed with the group. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they asked that detailed information about their employment be withheld for fear of retribution.
Bukele’s communications secretary did not respond to requests for comment about the troll operations.
These workers were cogs in what has become a powerful communications operation that has allowed Bukele to influence what Salvadorans read, watch and hear about their government like no previous leader of this small nation of 6.5 million people in the internet age.
Key to this effort are dozens of paid social media workers wielding hundreds of anonymous accounts and bots, a megaphone used to amplify the president’s messaging and deride opponents and journalists perceived as hostile to his administration, the individuals interviewed by Reuters said.
Bukele’s administration also has beefed up resources for traditional state-owned news outlets, which broadcast a steady stream of pro-Bukele content via print, television and radio. Government media now ranks among the sources most trusted by Salvadorans, according to a May 2022 study by the private Francisco Gavidia University in San Salvador.
The president has likewise become a gatekeeper, disseminating some key government policies through his Twitter account. Meanwhile his administration has sealed data that was once publicly available, including counts of missing persons and bodies in mass graves, a telltale sign of gang executions. Human rights groups and families of victims have claimed this is a way to make crime statistics look better than they really are. The Attorney General’s Office has defended this action as a way to protect investigations from potential interference by criminal organizations.
Bukele’s media machine is drawing concern in Washington.
A February 2022 internal U.S. State Department document, seen by Reuters, set out to map Bukele’s manipulation of El Salvador’s media landscape. His strategy, it says, is “to flood El Salvador with propaganda, demonize the institutions charged with debunking that propaganda – the free press and civil society – dominate public narratives, and repress dissent.”
The State Department did not respond to requests for comment. Bukele’s communications secretary did not respond to requests for comment about the report.
Repressive governments have long taken aim at press freedom. Disinformation is flourishing around the globe. Still, a senior U.S. official said Bukele’s strategy is particularly dangerous because it offers a coherent playbook for would-be autocrats to follow. “The strategies could be used by other actors in other regions,” the official said.
In examining Bukele’s media operation, Reuters interviewed more than 70 people, including former media operatives and social media researchers. Reuters talked to academics, journalists, cyber security experts, former intelligence officers, business executives, current and former lawmakers and officials.
Glowing domestic media coverage has helped the president consolidate his power base and weather several scandals, including allegations of graft in his administration. Bukele has denied wrongdoing.
An October 2022 CID Gallup poll asked people in 13 Latin American countries to rate their presidents. It showed Bukele with an 86{515baef3fee8ea94d67a98a2b336e0215adf67d225b0e21a4f5c9b13e8fbd502} approval rating in El Salvador, making him the most popular leader in the region.
Conservative Fox News host Tucker Carlson expressed similar admiration in a recent interview with Bukele that aired on Nov. 1, in which he credited the president for reducing crime. Other topics discussed included El Salvador’s decision last year to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. That move has drawn widespread skepticism from some international financial publications, given the volatility and lack of regulation of cryptocurrencies.
Bukele told Carlson that El Salvador’s embrace of Bitcoin was part of the country’s “rebranding,” and he dismissed the criticism as “fake news.”
Since that interview aired, the value of Bitcoin and other digital currencies has plummeted due to the implosion of the Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
At least 50 of the people Reuters interviewed said Bukele’s media juggernaut is helping to undermine the country’s fragile democratic institutions.
His party now controls El Salvador’s congress, which in turn has purged judges from key posts and appointed loyalists. That has paved the way for Bukele to run for president again in 2024 – an intention he announced in September – despite a constitutional ban on consecutive terms. On his watch, the state has suspended some civil liberties in the name of fighting criminal gangs: Authorities no longer need a search warrant to seize cell phone and computer data.
Bukele in April signed a law that could impose a maximum 15-year prison sentence on anyone who reproduces or transmits messages from criminal gangs through radio, television, written or digital media. The administration has backed the law as a way to bolster Bukele’s anti-gang policies. Reporters say the measure is hurting their ability to cover organized crime and state security policy.
Journalists have been barred from press conferences and harassed and threatened online by Bukele supporters, particularly when the president or one of his allies attacks them on Twitter, according to the nation’s press association. The group, known by its Spanish acronym APES, says at least a dozen journalists have fled El Salvador out of fear for their safety since Bukele was elected.
“The threat in El Salvador used to be from the gangs, now it’s from the state,” said Angelica Carcamo, the organization’s president.
Bukele’s communications secretary did not respond to requests for comment on the president’s treatment of journalists.
Public relations president
Bukele started his career in public relations: The son of a wealthy businessman with a variety of holdings, he took over Obermet, his family’s PR firm, in 2009. The left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) was a key client. Soon Bukele was a FMLN candidate himself. In 2012, he won his first election at age 31, becoming mayor of a city just outside San Salvador. Three years later, he became mayor of San Salvador.
In 2017, Bukele formed his own party, Nuevas Ideas, or New Ideas. Salvadorans swept him into the presidency two years later and gave New Ideas a majority in legislative elections in February 2021. Support has plummeted for the FMLN and the conservative ARENA party. The two parties dominated politics here for decades but lost support amid crushing poverty, crime and political corruption.
Bukele’s policies – capping gasoline prices, boosting the minimum wage, jailing more than 58,000 alleged gang members, announcing infrastructure plans – have bolstered his populist appeal.
“I like all the projects he is doing, the schools, the bridges, it is better for the country,” said Dominga de Peña, a 29-year-old mother and ice water vendor in El Zonte, a beach town along the Pacific Coast.
Less visible is the way his administration is manipulating communications to tighten its grip on power, according to the State Department report.
Bukele’s government uses paid influencers and “likely bot farms” to tweet pro-government messages “tens of thousands of times” on a given topic while masking their origin to “create the appearance of authentic grassroots support.”
The document said Bukele’s government uses paid influencers and “likely bot farms” to tweet pro-government messages “tens of thousands of times” on a given topic while masking their origin to “create the appearance of authentic grassroots support.”
Some 55,000 new Bukele follower accounts were created on Twitter between September and November 2021 alone, the report said, just after newly appointed judges cleared his path to re-election. The president currently boasts 4.4 million followers on Twitter. The report did not assess how many of them were authentic. It estimated that around 500,000 Salvadorans use the platform.
San Francisco-based Twitter and Mexico City-based Twitter Latin America did not respond to requests for comment.
One of the researchers for the State Department study told Reuters they had traced hundreds of pro-Bukele tweets to specific geographic coordinates, including those of a single residential dwelling in San Salvador. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added that hundreds of accounts would retweet pro-Bukele messages at the same millisecond, an indication of bot and troll activity.
The State Department document was consistent with the accounts of the communications specialist and one of the other contract workers who told Reuters they worked together on the same secretive communications team.
The pair said they were part of a crew of around 20 people, ranging in age from their early 20s to their early 30s. Some had backgrounds in publicity or marketing, they said, and all were facile with social media.
The two ex-contractors said their office initially was located in a government ministry, then moved to a home in a residential neighborhood of San Salvador. Both said their boss was a government minister whose portfolio was unrelated to state communications or media.
Their tasks, they said, included creating fake Twitter accounts to praise Bukele and New Ideas and amplify their messaging. The communications specialist showed Reuters close to 200 Twitter accounts allegedly created at their troll center. The overwhelming majority of these allegedly fake accounts had fewer than 90 followers and were created between January 2019 – the month before Bukele won the election – and November 2020. Earlier this month, 76 of those accounts were still active.
The ex-contractors said they also kept tabs on Bukele critics and reported hundreds of them to Twitter every month for alleged violations of the platform’s standards in an attempt to get the company to suspend their accounts. The communications specialist showed Reuters a 2020 screenshot from Twitter in which the company acknowledged that the contractor had made more than 900 such requests in a single month.
Twitter did not respond to requests for comment about the alleged complaints filed against Bukele critics.
The pair said government officials, including ministers, directed them on what content to promote and which people to monitor and report. Instructions came via private messaging groups on WhatsApp and Signal, which are encrypted. Reuters could not independently verify the existence of these private chat groups.
Members of other troll teams were in these messaging groups, according to the communications specialist. A former government employee who spoke with Reuters confirmed the existence of a separate troll team of about 15 people operating at locations different from the ones where the two ex-contractors worked: first, inside El Salvador’s presidential building for several months between 2020 and 2021, followed by a private home in San Salvador.
Bukele’s communications secretary did not respond to requests for comment on these allegations.
Alberto Escorcia, a Mexican cybersecurity expert specializing in social media manipulation, examined the nearly 200 allegedly fake Twitter accounts that the communications specialist shared with Reuters. He said they matched the general profile for troll accounts: They were recently created, had few followers and posted or retweeted mainly pro-Bukele content.
Escorcia, who has tracked Bukele’s political rise, said he has noted such “inauthentic behaviors” in his online presence for years. Escorcia said he shared his concerns about El Salvador with the company’s Latin America team in November 2018, but was later told that the company had found nothing irregular. Escorcia said he had no written documentation of Twitter’s response.
“I found a lot more manipulation in El Salvador than in Mexico,” Escorcia said. “And it seems to be getting worse.”
Twitter and Twitter Latin America did not respond to requests for comment about Escorcia’s allegations.
Twitter isn’t the only platform being used to amplify pro-Bukele messaging, according to the State Department report. Researchers said they found similar material on 1,500 YouTube channels, 1,056 Facebook pages, 520 WhatsApp groups across El Salvador’s 262 municipalities, and 62 digital media outlets.
Meta, the company that owns Facebook and WhatsApp, told Reuters that the company had disrupted two inauthentic networks originating in and targeting El Salvador, one in March 2021 and the other in the first quarter of 2022. The spokesperson added that the company had blocked billions of fake accounts globally, and that it shares “findings with our peers at tech companies, security researchers, governments, and law enforcement. We also alert people who we believe were targeted by these campaigns, when possible.”
YouTube did not respond to requests for comment.
Beyond social media
Bukele is also shaking up El Salvador’s traditional media. The country’s independent press association said the government now controls “no less than 20 mass media” in El Salvador, including 14 radio stations and television station Channel 10.
In the past few years, the government has poached personnel from legacy news outlets to bulk up pro-Bukele media and add to the communications departments of government ministries, according to the State Department document. Bukele “buys off journalists and drowns opposition media in a sea of state-run media propaganda,” the U.S. study found.
One major talent raid came two years ago, when around 30 journalists from La Prensa Gráfica, one of the country’s largest legacy newspapers, resigned to go to work for a new government-owned publication, Diario El Salvador, according to six people familiar with the situation. That start-up, funded by a subsidiary of the state power company, began publishing in October 2020, and provides consistently favorable coverage of Bukele and his policies.
Cristian Villalta, who took over as editor-in-chief of La Prensa Gráfica following the exodus, said Bukele aides had offered some workers as much as three times their former salaries to switch. Two defectors told Reuters their pay doubled.
The state power company, its subsidiary and Diario El Salvador did not respond to requests for comment.
In September 2020, government-owned Channel 10 launched “Noticiero El Salvador,” a program that regularly highlights Bukele’s achievements, and which Communications Secretary Sofía Medina said would give the state “its own window, its own voice, the truth available to the people.”
Medina did not respond to requests for comment.
A news program highlighting the achievements of El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele debuted on state-owned television in September 2020. Sofía Medina, the president’s communications secretary, said on Twitter that the show would be a “new way of doing journalism” and that “it may be UNCOMFORTABLE for some.”
Offline backlash
Pro-Bukele media covers the president’s attacks on independent Salvadoran press, including digital news site El Faro. That outlet has reported on a variety of purported government malfeasance, including alleged embezzlement of COVID funds by some of the president’s allies.
Bukele’s communications secretary did not comment on allegations that members of the administration stole state funds.
In September 2020, Bukele announced that federal prosecutors were investigating El Faro for alleged money laundering and tax evasion. No charges have been filed. El Faro told Reuters the government has audited its books as part of the probe, which it claims is an attempt to silence the outlet.
El Salvador’s prosecutor’s office and Bukele’s communications secretary did not respond to requests for comment about the probe or assertions by El Faro that the investigation is an attempt to silence the press.
Twenty journalists and activists told Reuters they had received online harassment and death threats, some of which they shared with Reuters. The country’s press association told Reuters it has received similar accounts from journalists.
Bukele’s communications secretary did not respond to requests for comment on those claims.
Edwin Segura, a data and poll reporter for La Prensa Gráfica, said he has blocked at least 2,400 harassing Twitter accounts since Bukele became president.
In mid-December 2019, Segura had a sarcastic Twitter exchange with Carlos Marroquín, the head of Tejido Social, a government social welfare agency.
“I’m used to governments calling me a liar, but not being worried that the government might arrest me or try to publicly destroy me.”
Segura said insults, death threats and harassment quickly followed. He shared some of those messages with Reuters. Several of the accounts that sent them are presently suspended for violating Twitter’s rules. “I’m used to governments calling me a liar, but not being worried that the government might arrest me or try to publicly destroy me,” Segura said.
Marroquín did not respond to requests for comment about the exchange and the subsequent threats.
In the United States, U.S. Representative Norma Torres, a Democrat from California, experienced a similar backlash after sparring with Bukele on Twitter. She told Reuters she sleeps with a gun near her bed due to a barrage of threats from his supporters and trolls.
A native of Guatemala, Torres has been critical of the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras for creating conditions that spur migration. She dates much of the tension with Bukele to April 1, 2021, when she tweeted a photo of a Salvadoran father and his young daughter who had drowned in the Rio Grande trying to reach the United States.
“This is a result of narcissistic dictators like you interested in being ‘cool’ while people flee by the 1000s & die by the 100s,” she tweeted in English and Spanish at Bukele’s account on Twitter. Bukele responded with his own tweet about an hour and a half later, urging Latinos in Torres’s district to boot her from office.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele traded Twitter barbs with U.S. Representative Norma Torres in April 2021. He urged Latinos to withhold their support from the California congresswoman. “DON’T VOTE for @NormaJTorres. She does not work for you, but to keep our countries underdeveloped.”
Torres said she immediately was inundated with online threats and hostile messages, some of which her office shared with Reuters. Many were from newly created Twitter accounts with few followers and no personal information.
Twitter did not comment on the attacks on Torres.
Bukele’s communications secretary did not respond to requests for comment on Torres’s case.
The congresswoman said the harassment continued into the run-up to this year’s midterm contests. Torres won re-election. But she said she still keeps her firearm close by.
“I’ve never had threats to this level,” Torres said. “Bukele will light the fire and then demand everyone around him pour fuel on it.”
Iran point out media has called for the US to be kicked out of the 2022 Earth Cup just after the United States Soccer Federation transformed Iran’s flag on its social media platforms to display support for protesters in Iran.
The federation had temporarily shown Iran’s countrywide flag on its formal Twitter, Instagram and Fb accounts without having the emblem of the Islamic Republic. A now-deleted graphic of the Team B standings posted on Saturday shown the Iranian flag only bearing its eco-friendly, white and pink colours.
US Soccer informed CNN on Sunday that it wished to adjust the official flag for 24 hours to exhibit “support for the women of all ages in Iran battling for fundamental human rights” but often prepared to go back again to the unique flag.
The improve “was a one particular-time graphic,” US Soccer advised CNN. “We have the most important flag on our web page and other sites.” The emblem is at the moment back again on the flag on US Soccer’s social media channels.
A spokesperson for the State Division told CNN it did not coordinate with US Soccer in the sporting body’s decision to transform Iran’s flag on its social media accounts to clearly show assist for protesters in Iran.
“We seem ahead to a tranquil and aggressive match on the field. The United States carries on to obtain techniques to assistance the Iranian persons in the encounter of condition-sponsored violence in opposition to gals and a brutal crackdown towards peaceful protestors,” the Point out Department advised CNN.
Iran state media reported Sunday that the United States must be straight away kicked out of the event and suspended for 10 games for a “distorted image” of the country’s flag.
“By posting a distorted graphic of the flag of the Islamic Republic of #Iran on its official account, the #US soccer crew breached the @FIFAcom charter, for which a 10-activity suspension is the ideal penalty,” Iran condition-aligned Tasnim information company wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “Team #Usa should really be kicked out of the #WorldCup2022.”
FIFA did not straight away respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Iran and the US perform each and every other on Tuesday in a crucial Team B match. It is a have to-earn tie for the US if it is to progress to the knockout phases.
Iran is showing at this World Cup less than the shadow of domestic turmoil. The United Nations Superior Commissioner for Human Rights Chief, Volker Turk, has reported that the state is in a “full-fledged human rights crisis” as authorities clamp down on anti-regime dissidents.
Protests, referred to by experts as the most significant considering the fact that the institution of clerical rule pursuing the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and violence have rocked Iran in latest months and threatened the really character of the country’s regime, which has been in power for more than 40 years.
It was sparked by the loss of life of Mahsa Amini, a 22-12 months-old girl who died right after staying detained by Iran’s morality police, allegedly for not abiding by the country’s conservative dress code. Iranian security forces have unleashed a violent reaction.
The most up-to-date controversy arrives following a working day of difficulties in advance of the two teams’ Team B clash in Doha at the Al Thumama Stadium.
US Soccer’s selection came on the exact same working day the previous US Men’s Nationwide Team’s (USMNT) head mentor Jurgen Klinsmann said he will try out to communicate with Iran’s manager, Carlos Queiroz, to “calm issues down” just after Klinsmann’s opinions about Iran’s tradition had been branded “outrageous remarks.”
Pursuing Iran’s 2- victory about Wales on Friday, Klinsmann reviewed Iran’s mindset toward the recreation of soccer, led by Queiroz, for the duration of a panel discussion on the BBC.
“That’s their culture and which is their way of doing it and which is why Carlos Queiroz, he matches actually very well in the Iranian national workforce,” Klinsmann stated. “He struggled in South The us. He unsuccessful with Colombia to qualify then he failed with Egypt to qualify as very well and then he went again appropriate just before the World Cup now and guided Iran where he labored previously for a very long, prolonged time.
“This is not by coincidence. This is all purposely. This is just aspect of their lifestyle. Which is how they enjoy it and they do the job the referee. You noticed the bench normally leaping off, usually working the fourth, the linesmen and the fourth referee on the sideline, continually in their ears. They are frequently in your experience on the subject.”
The 1990 World Cup winner continued: “This is their culture and they kind of make you lose your emphasis and make you reduce your focus and what is really important to you.”
“Even not understanding me personally, you dilemma my character with a common prejudiced judgment of superiority,” Queiroz wrote. “No subject how substantially I can regard what you did within the pitch, these remarks about Iran Lifestyle, Iran National Workforce and my Players are a shame to Soccer. Nobody can hurt our integrity if it is not at our stage, of system.”
Queiroz additional: “As American/German, we have an understanding of your no guidance. No challenge. And in spite of your outrageous remarks on BBC hoping to undermine our efforts, sacrifices and abilities, we assure you that we will not create any judgments pertaining to your tradition, roots and track record and that you will constantly be welcome to our Loved ones.”
The Iran Football Federation, in a statement, demanded Klinsmann apologize and resign from his Qatar 2022 Technical Analyze Group situation with FIFA. Iran reported it has requested FIFA “for quick clarification on this make any difference.”
CNN has attained out to FIFA for remark but did not get a response at time of publication.
On Sunday, Klinsmann reported on BBC Breakfast: “There was stuff definitely taken out of context. I will check out to give him a call and serene points down. I have hardly ever criticized Carlos or the Iranian bench. Some even considered I was criticizing the referee simply because he did not do anything about the way they were behaving on the bench.
“All I explained was their emotional way of doing items, which is really admirable in a particular way. The total bench life the game. They’re jumping up and down and Carlos is a very psychological coach. He’s consistently on the sidelines striving to give his players all his energy and route.”
The federation invited Klinsmann to take a look at Group Melli Camp in Doha and “for a lecture on the millennial Persian society and the values of soccer and activity.”
