Anatomy of an assembly

In a recent ruling, the Superior Court of Bogotá issued a definitive decision in second instance, ordering RTVC, now known again as Inravisión, and the magazine Raya to correct the falsehoods they spread regarding La Silla Vacía and its editor-in-chief, Juanita León. The court found that these media entities had fabricated claims suggesting that La Silla Vacía was part of a million-dollar scheme aimed at manipulating public opinion, and that their journalistic content had been designed to support a presidential candidacy. These allegations were deemed false, with the court noting that the explanations given by the publication’s director were consistent from the beginning. The attack came during the night of April 19th, when the official propaganda apparatus launched a coordinated campaign against La Silla Vacía. A week later, the assault continued with renewed intensity. As explained earlier, I am included in this situation because, due to my personal views, RTVC and Raya decided to involve me in their misinformation effort. Additionally, I provide legal advice to La Silla Vacía, making the defense not just a professional duty but also a cause close to my heart. Over the years, I have studied the dynamics of online disinformation, the nature of coordinated attacks, and the contours of conspiracy theories. This time, the stage was set perfectly for me. I watched both episodes of Señal Investigativa four or five times, some at a fast pace, others slowly, focusing either on the video or just the audio. I repeated fragments that later appeared in my dreams. I did what I would never have done as a casual consumer of such information. Few people have seen any of these videos in full, none were shown repeatedly, and most paid little attention. It is here that the magic of lies in the age of social networks lives: without context or time, in scattered doses or snippets, any accusation seems credible if it has enough embellishment, the ceremonial music and lighting, the serious tone of the journalist, the frantic rhythm of images and documents. At the end, we don’t know exactly what we saw, but we conclude it is something serious. The rhetorical strategy used by Señal Investigativa consisted of presenting a speculative hypothesis as a fact and then linking it to anything else to derive a list of irregularities. That is, without sufficient basis, they defined “Project Jupiter” upfront as a coordinated, remunerated, and irregular initiative, intended to constrain workers in large companies and manipulate public opinion for electoral purposes, and then connected events, statements, or documents to this project they had already characterized. The syllogism reduced itself to a minimal chain: Jupiter manipulates; X appears mentioned in Jupiter; therefore, X is part of the manipulation. The foundation of the so-called “Project Jupiter” was based on some talks that former Foreign Minister Jaime Bermúdez gave in meetings and workshops with businesspeople. The core of the supposed conspiracy was introduced from the start by Edinson Bolaños, the director of Raya and host of Señal Investigativa: “Bermúdez states in private meetings that the goal of his plan is to generate fear, anger, and uncertainty among Colombians, for which he would have raised over seven billion pesos up until last March.” There was a sticky label, a villain, and a dark plot. However, Bermúdez never explicitly stated this as the purpose of the project, nor could it be concluded from the images presented. The words came from the label of a slide, “Main emotions: fear, anger, and uncertainty”, apparently from a campaign.