25 minutes into the game, Sergio Busquets had to leave the pitch due to a knee injury. In came Karim Benzema. The play would end with a quick transition that would end at the bottom of the Vinicius network. It was the first goal of the Super Cup semi-final between Barça and Real Madrid. With the final defeat, this mistake would end up being the trigger for an avalanche of criticism directed at the Barça captain on social media, specifically on Twitter, in which he is asked to be replaced with the hashtag #BusquetsEnElBanquillo and with all the answers that criticize him, both in the contents of the sports press that follows Barça as journalists in particular. If two years ago the Super Cup in Saudi Arabia accelerated the hashtag #ValverdeOut, now the donkey of the blows is the midfielder of Badia del Vallès.
The large number of messages with the hashtag (more than 100,000) and the speed with which some responses have been produced suggest that this may be a campaign against the Barça player, but influencers of the Arab world, with hundreds of thousands of followers on their Twitter profiles, deny it on ARA. “There is no campaign to discredit Busquets. There are simply a lot of Barça fans in the Arab world who follow the team’s day to day with passion, and this is the way they have to express their opinion from a distance.” , reports one of the sources consulted, who prefers to remain anonymous. “There is no such thing as a campaign, but thousands of fans, through the hashtag, ask for changes at Barça and consider that other players, such as Nico or Frenkie de Jong, are the ones who should play in Busquets’ place as starters. There may be a small percentage of bots, but most of them are real people. ” with messages written (and translated) on the mobile phone shouting against Busquets.
This Monday, the program What are you playing at? of Ràdio Barcelona shared a survey on Twitter in which he asked if Busquets should continue to be the headline, and the result soon climbed to the no, with thousands of votes. Other tweets from the same program received hundreds of responses with posts related to the captain. They even did an experiment in which the word “Busquets” and a photo of the player with other concepts far removed from football such as “calçots, botifarra or allioli” came together in a single tweet, and the publication began to receive comments. with the hashtag #BusquetsEnElBanquillo from profiles with Arabic names. “In order to delimit whether there is an orchestrated campaign, one should analyze in depth whether these are false profiles, whether they are followers of this program in question, what interaction there is between them … What does jump to the The point is, there is unnatural behavior, “she said Mariluz Congosto, which specializes in analyzing the spread of messages and characterizing profiles on social media.
“There are more than 120,000 tweets with this one hashtag“It ‘s not a futile figure,” he said What are you playing at?, with hundreds of comments, Congosto explains that “when there are so many comments in a post from the same medium, it’s weird unless all these people are followers of the same medium or the topic is trending topicThe teacher resolves that this is unusual behavior because “many of these users who have commented on the post do not follow each other, and this is strange, they look like profiles designed to make noise.”
Congosto also explains that there is a very large community of Barça and Madrid fans in the countries of the Arab world (made up of more than 20 states), but that oneself hashtag have “more than 120,000 tweets” can only be explained, if not a campaign, by the fact that the issue was a trend in the Arab world. The expert sums it up in two key points: “Either there is a great shared fervor in a large community of people who possibly only think of football, because doing so on other issues can have repercussions for them, or, ultimately, “It’s a campaign, which is explained by the high percentage of people who comment on posts without being connected to each other.”
Campaign or fervor?
For his part, Ferran Lalueza, Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the UOC, also points out that the subject in question, Barça and football, makes it difficult to know to what extent this is a campaign. because “it is a topic that arouses many passions and of which it is easy to opine and generate currents of debate and criticism”, while warning of advances in the sophistication of fake profiles in networks and the existence of this type of covert market . Despite the unnatural behaviors in the networks, the teacher also exposes the “multiplier effect” of the hashtag: “When there is a topic that arouses interest, searches are made and the same algorithms feed back the content that incorporates these hashtags and visibility is expanding and strengthening. ”
However, the two experts consulted agree that “in no case” can it be ruled out that it is a campaign, but argue that the nature of an issue that admits as much opinion as football makes it more difficult to detect if there is a campaign in the behind. “When you’re not talking about a topic and suddenly there is an avalanche of tweets, it’s more suspicious, but in this case it’s all about a football game. If it’s a campaign, who Could you be interested? “Lalueza asks. “If it were a campaign, it could be launched from anywhere in the world. Disinformation agencies exist,” Congosto recalls. The use of bots on the networks and the noise they generate is still a reality in the day-to-day life of social networks and, depending on the magnitude, “they are not particularly expensive”, concludes the teacher.
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