Last Sunday was the second round of the Colombian presidential election, and far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella won. For those unfamiliar with him, he resembles many figures in our international political environment: a Trump, a Milei, a Bukele. *Sigh*

He ran on a campaign promising “security.” Yet he left a trail of violence behind him that was anything but secure.

That trail is not an aberration. It’s a clear example of an attention economy that prioritizes certain kinds of violence over others—and a media ecosystem that sustains, rather than challenges, such patterns

In this short entry, I want to process the election grief through a reflection on politics, media, and the visibility of violence.

The trail of violence of Abelardo de la Espriella

What do I mean when I mention a trail of violence? Well, there are too many instances of violence attached to De la Espriella to list exhaustively, but I think that they can be broadly organized into three categories.

• Political violence. A lifetime of sustaining corruption and violence. For instance, decades spent defending and organizing the very people terrorizing the country. It is this work that earned him the nickname “the devil’s advocate.”
• Gendered violence. This was a recurring feature of his campaign. These acts of harm go from exposing himself to a female journalist to a public accusation from the family of Rosa Elvira Cely (a famous victim of feminicide in Colombia), who said De la Espriella revictimized them.
• Animal violence. He has recounted, laughing, killing a cat as a child using fireworks.

Listed together, we can see that these aren’t trivial, isolated, or unrelated. Rather, they are a pattern of disregard for other lives.

So, then, how did he—like Trump, Bukele, or Milei, who have similar stories of violence and abuse—win the popular vote? Part of the answer, I think, lies in how social media was mobilized to render certain forms of suffering in/visible.

Media strategy, or how to make others look the other way

As journalism scholar Silvia Montaña noted on Bluesky, the second round of the Colombian presidential election never held a televised debate. In its place, public discussion was mostly held online, particularly on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

Accordingly, De la Espriella relied on social media (and on the language and symbols native to it) to run his campaign. For example, he worked closely with influencers in his campaign. Similarly, he appropriated the saluting-face emoji (🫡) as a campaign signature.

And, like all social media (political or not) strategies, his campaign was centred on dominating the regimes of visibility that determined what Colombians paid attention to—and it worked. In particular, it worked in reorienting how the country talked about violence.

He did this through a simple three-part message:

1. The violence he exercised is undeserving of attention (i.e., it is trivial). For instance, influencers associated with him repeatedly said it was unimportant that he exposed himself to a journalist.
2. The only violence worth addressing in the country is the violence committed by left-wing criminals (i.e., look over there). Here, he repeatedly called for a return to a “hard hand” against guerrilla and illegal groups.
3. He alone is equipped to deal with the violence that is “worth addressing” (i.e., only I can deal with it), with plans to build mega-jails à la Bukele, and to fight the guerrillas directly.

These (sadly, successful) messages are not a trivial marketing strategy. They are an effective effort to minimize the suffering of thousands of Colombians—a strategy made possible by social media’s own architecture of attention.

Who is left un/seen?

As social media floods us with information, what counts as “worth our attention” has changed. As Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Higgins argue in their 2023 book, today’s economy of visibility isn’t about what’s true—it is about what is believed to be worth attention.

So it’s not that De la Espriella didn’t sexually harass a journalist on live television. It’s that his social media strategy successfully recast it as trivial—a footnote of his campaign, not a story.

And believability, Banet-Weiser and Higgins show, is not handed out evenly. The more capital (economic, cultural, political) a person holds, the less labour they need to do to be believed. Everyone else has to fight just to be heard.

De la Espriella was never in a fair fight for visibility against his peers (rich, powerful men). The real cost fell on people already struggling to be seen (women, political minorities), who were pushed further into the dark.

He didn’t even deny his violence. He didn’t need to; the evidence is undeniable. Instead, he made the case that it didn’t matter. With one hand, he pointed at others and yelled: “Look at them. They’re violent, deal with them.” With the other, he hurt women, animals, and other political groups.

And it worked. Well, this certainly was not the only reason he won, but it was one of the currents that carried him. 49.65% of Colombians looked where he pointed, and at least some of them decided (consciously or not) that certain lives mattered less than others.

What does it take to make a society where victims of violence can trust it again? And what would it mean to build a media ecosystem that doesn’t just sustain an unequal regime of visibility, but challenges it?

PS1.

I know many of those who voted for De la Espriella argue that Cepeda was close to the guerrilla, and that this made him the real danger, the one who was actually violent. I won’t get into that debate in full here, but I do want to point out something: even the accusations against Cepeda are about association (alleged ties, old photographs, mentions in a dead guerrilla commander’s laptop) rather than about the violence he himself committed. I’m no fan of his, but he never joked about killing cats, or exposed himself to a journalist, or stood accused of revictimizing a feminicide victim’s family.

And that, precisely, is the point of this whole piece. There’s a difference between pointing to a political proximity (a suspicion, an old association) and what De la Espriella actually did: defending paramilitaries as a career, exposing himself to a journalist, laughing while recounting how he killed a cat. That’s not proximity or suspicion. That’s documented violence, acknowledged by his own mouth.

PS2.

For most of this year, I’ve carried a quiet dread that the field I work in (i.e., the study of social media) is becoming irrelevant. Replaced by AI. Reduced to parasociality.

And I guess that this election didn’t quite cure that dread. But it certainly complicated it. AI, parasociality, and technological change are coming, yes, but they are not landing on a blank slate. Social media is still doing the work of deciding what we notice, who we believe, and whose pain counts. That work just elected a president in my country.

So I am left with a question. Not necessarily about whether our field still matters. Rather, a question about how we can keep one eye on the new shiny thing without losing the thread of what we’ve already learned.