In recent weeks, conservative discourse has spread more widely across social media. Influencers who have expressed controversial opinions have justified their content by invoking freedom of expression, without acknowledging the right of reply exercised by other content creators who respond with concern over the possible rollback of civil rights.
Conservative discourses in Latin America have found a niche audience on social media, which appears segmented by preference, much like media agendas are shaped in traditional outlets. These spaces have shaped digital profiles that act as countercultures in the digital sphere: the manosphere, the tradwife movement, libertarian ideology, and, more recently, anti-democratic conservatism.
These narratives, which share an ultraconservative ideological core, spread more rapidly on social media through mechanisms of disinformation or through content loosely based on solid theories or concepts. Recently, opinion pieces by Mexican influencers have been identified advocating for the removal of voting rights from certain demographic groups. Similarly, the tradwife movement in the United States has become institutionalized through organizations such as Turning Point, which openly promotes abolishing women’s right to vote and granting voting rights exclusively to men.
However unrealistic this discourse may be, it is neither trivial nor entirely innocent in its dissemination. According to Everson (2025) in Forbes, Turning Point raised $389 million from its founding in 2012 through mid-2023, from funds linked to Republican figures and billionaires such as Tim Dunn, who also financed both of Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns. These coordinated efforts aim to promote ideologies that favor more conservative political figures, with the possibility of reaching the U.S. Congress in the upcoming midterm elections.
One point to consider is that governments across the Americas have shifted toward the right, authoritarianism, and the dismantling of government institutions that had safeguarded civil rights, such as autonomous government bodies. The phenomenon of democratic erosion, described by researcher Susan Stokes (cited in Steimer, 2025), points to a vicious cycle between authoritarianism and institutional deterioration, intensified by polarization between antagonistic discourses. It is not trivial that influencers and people with media power, in their own digital spaces, advocate for differentiated voting rights without acknowledging the consequences of their proposals.
It is important to point out that when someone expresses an opinion on social media, the right of reply is granted automatically. Social science communicators and activists have qualified these proposals with explanations grounded in theoretical and scientific evidence. The main criticism of the idea that “only a few should be allowed to vote” is that it undermines the basic civil rights necessary for democracy to endure; moreover, these influencers make inaccuracies and basic errors regarding fields such as political science and constitutional law.
Indifference to disinformation is risky, precisely because it fuels polarization that reduces arguments to stereotypes and traps interlocutors in echo chambers. Unfortunately, disinformation has immediate and irreversible effects in the digital sphere. Even when experienced communicators with solid expertise in their fields try to disseminate educational content to counter anti-rights discourse, disinformation will already have affected the cognition of susceptible social media users.
It is still difficult to measure the consequences of disinformation on political mobilization in real life, but polarization is visible in the region’s electoral results in recent years. Electoral campaigns, for example, that adopt these ultraconservative proposals already have the support of people who have not critically examined or cross-checked the messages; consequently, they are less likely to question whether they themselves could lose their rights, or they may simply accept these conditions without considering their short-term consequences.
Ideological polarization driven by disinformation fragments civil society into factions seeking total control of political power; this scenario reduces political checks and balances to their bare minimum, leaving vulnerable groups with less visibility and fewer opportunities to be considered in the design of public policies that represent them. In other words, an anti-democratic movement instrumentalizes an already eroded democracy to mobilize people into voluntarily surrendering their rights, manipulated by content permeated with political disinformation in the digital sphere.
Philosopher Nancy Fraser (2017) describes this democratic contradiction as “progressive neoliberalism”: parties that identified themselves as center-left used social causes to promote political campaigns that would bring them to power through democratic processes, changing the form (a prominently inclusive discourse) while leaving the substance untouched (an extractive system of economic reproduction).
In other words, political representation narratives were not accompanied by structural changes in economic public policies or development plans that promoted social equity. These inconsistencies are exploited by ultraconservative movements, which use digital media to disseminate disinformation and encourage political mobilization aimed at establishing totalitarian governments.
The risk to society is extremely high, and actors involved in the digital sphere must accept responsibility for promoting anti-rights discourses, such as restricting voting rights for certain demographic groups. Unlike social science communicators, who have verifiable credentials that support their informed opinions, influencers emerge as self-appointed voices without assuming the responsibilities that should accompany their role as mass communicators.
It is necessary to call on all science communicators to commit to the defense of civil rights, adding nuance to their discourse, and putting it in the service of media literacy, which may be the most effective resource for counteracting the democratic erosion currently affecting Latin America.
References
- Everson, Z. (2025, September 22). Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA raised $389 million—including $13.1 million from this Texas foundation. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2025/09/22/turning-point-usa-charlie-kirk-donors-texas-foundation/
- Fraser, N. (2017, January 2). The end of progressive neoliberalism. Dissent. https://dissentmagazine.org/article/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser/
- Steimer, S. (2025, January 17). Economic inequality leads to democratic erosion, study finds. University of Chicago News. https://news.uchicago.edu/story/economic-inequality-leads-democratic-erosion-study-finds
Author
Alejandra G. Marmolejo is a professor at the School of Social Sciences and Government at Tecnológico de Monterrey. She holds a Master’s degree in Social Sciences from UAM and is a PhD candidate in Public Policy at the School of Government and Public Transformation at Tecnológico de Monterrey. She is a columnist for the Digital Media Observatory.
This article was originally published by the Digital Media Observatory of the School of Humanities and Education at Tecnológico de Monterrey.
