Armed groups of civilians known as \u201cself-defense forces\u201d have ousted the powerful Knights Templar drug cartel from several towns in Michoac\u00e1n, M\u00e9xico. This militia uprising has unfolded on social media, particularly in the \u201cVXM\u201d (\u201cValor por Michoac\u00e1n,\u201d Spanish for \u201cCourage for Michoac\u00e1n\u201d) Facebook page, gathering more than 170,000 fans. Previous work on the Drug War has documented the use of social media for real-time reports of violent clashes. However, VXM goes one step further by taking on a pro-militia propagandist role, engaging in two-way communication with its audience. This paper presents a descriptive analysis of VXM and its audience. We examined nine months of posts, from VXM\u2019s inception until May 2014, totaling 6,000 posts by VXM administrators and more than 108,000 comments from its audience. We describe the main conversation themes, post frequency and relationships with offline events and public figures. We also characterize the behavior of VXM\u2019s most active audience members. Our work illustrates VXM\u2019s online mobilization strategies, and how its audience takes part in defining the narrative of this armed conflict. We conclude by discussing possible applications of our findings for the design of future communication technologies<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Armed groups of civilians known as \u201cself-defense forces\u201d have ousted the powerful Knights Templar drug cartel from several towns in Michoac\u00e1n, M\u00e9xico. This militia uprising has unfolded on social media, particularly in the \u201cVXM\u201d (\u201cValor por Michoac\u00e1n,\u201d Spanish for \u201cCourage for Michoac\u00e1n\u201d) Facebook page, gathering more than 170,000 fans. Previous work on the Drug War […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"ACM - Association for Computing Machinery","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"In Proceedings of CSCW 2015","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"In Proceedings of CSCW 2015","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"\u00a9 ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. 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