Why ecuador hates us

In power since , and widely praised for high spending on roads, hospitals and schools, the year-old Correa is expected to run for re-election in February Ecuador might take the case to the International Court of Justice, Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said on Monday, but would prefer other alternatives like convincing London to allow Assange to travel to Ecuador or provide guarantees he would not be extradited to the United States. Correa is a feisty leader who never shies away from a fight, be it with international bondholders, oil companies, local bankers, the Catholic Church or media organizations that criticize his policies.

Thus the granting of asylum implies the allegation that in Britain the judiciary is misused against political opponents. A false claim, perhaps, but one that makes the Ecuadorian position at least theoretically tenable. Interesting question: would he have his internet access cut off if it were the other way round?

Perhaps the Ecuadorian position is to be read as "we do not want to intervene" rather than "we must not intervene"? Although the wording of the note rather points to the latter. Namely that Russia has realized that Wikileaks will leak anything of notoriety. Moreover, Wikileaks leaks often get global attention in the media. Thus, it is a great place to leak stuff that normal press outlets might not want to deal with, or use more carefully the political leanings of the editorial team.

Smoke from Molotov cocktails and tear gas blanketed buildings, mixing with the flames of burning tires. Whole families marched in the melee. Men with T-shirts tied around their mouths threw rocks at riot police, who responded with rubber bullets.

There was a constant cacophony of sirens. Immediately, the price of diesel more than doubled. Many people were already struggling under growing inequality, and with this final blow, they took to the streets. From the start, the president, flanked by soldiers, insisted that there were no real problems and accused his critics of orchestrating the protests. Simultaneously, his administration appeared to be stifling information.

At least 16 reporters were attacked on the first day of the demonstrations, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reprimanded the police for its brutality against the press. In the absence of real information, opinions formed fast on Twitter. Instead, social media overwhelmingly targeted the protesters. There had been warnings that this would happen. Some people claimed that indigenous women were being used by indigenous men as human shields against the police; others said that Quito had been destroyed by indigenous activists who hated modernity.

The groundwork for this backlash had been put in place years earlier. Since the early years of his administration, fake social media accounts had consistently attacked them as backward, dumb, and violent. The racism indicated a fear of their power. There are 14 indigenous nationalities in Ecuador — together, about 1.

Their activism around land and cultural rights has placed them at odds with the mining and oil-extraction aims of successive presidential administrations.

The unrest lasted 11 days. On October 13, when President Moreno finally negotiated a deal with indigenous groups to end their participation in the protests, the hashtag was repurposed to accuse the government of surrendering to terrorism.

In total, according to an analytics report, the hashtag was mentioned in 16, tweets and retweets that reached almost 5. To make sense of these numbers, social network researcher Alberto Escorcia ran an analysis of the hashtag using specialized software.

The resulting image looked like the roots of a tree: Within the root system, there were clusters of squares, circles, and triangles representing bots that had coordinated mass retweets in short bursts of time. In addition to the bots, he also found clear evidence of troll accounts retweeting the hashtag. Some users of the CONAIEterroristas hashtag appeared to be real people who were perhaps unaware that many of their conversation partners were not humans but synchronized machines.

The distinction can be subtle. Journalists and data scientists know to look for certain signs that a social media account is fake, and experts like Escorcia can use analytics tools to reveal evidence of irregular behavior. But there are no perfect ways to measure the impact of trolls. But the methods by which it was carried out were new, and were built on a strategy perfected by none other than former President Correa. A microphone hung jauntily from his left hand.

The camera was positioned slightly below him, so viewers had to gaze up at him. Correa did this show every Saturday morning during all ten years of his presidency, and because it was carried by at least radio stations and two television channels, much of Ecuador heard or watched it.

That day, he was talking about a citizen who had berated him on Twitter. The offender turned out to be an year-old boy. Many more of us.

Then he addressed the nation. He also encouraged them to counterattack.