How FARC dissidents operate in TikTok
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"I'm going to get lost on the hard roads of my hard guerrilla life," is heard in the song that plays in the background of a video that accumulates nearly 50,000 views on TikTok and in which a young woman dressed in camouflage appears. In another piece, the same woman dances in her room while listening to a song that salutes and celebrates two guerrilla fronts in Colombia.
Over the course of four weeks, the BBC Monitoring service identified more than fifty TikTok accounts associated with alleged members of the Central General Staff (EMC) of the Farc-EP, a dissident guerrilla group demobilized following Colombia's 2016 peace accords.
We analyzed some of these contents to understand how these users are interacting on the platform and the challenges of moderating this digital window of the Colombian armed conflict.
In TikTok, references to the guerrilla are not always explicit, unlike what happens on Facebook, as we observed a few months ago in alliance with La Silla Vacía. In the latter space, users do not seek to disguise their affiliation and even indicate in their biographies that they are part of the EMC; in TikTok the language is more veiled and the allusions appear in other ways.
In the absence of emojis that represent the armed struggle, users have opted to stretch the meaning of those that are available. For example, several pieces use, both in the descriptions and in the videos, the emoji of the ninja, in which a person with his face covered and a saber hanging on his back appears, a possible allusion to the balaclavas and rifles carried in certain parts of the country by members of insurgent groups.
On TikTok, unlike what we observe on Facebook, users do not share official EMC communiqués or make open calls to invite young people to join their ranks. However, the effect that TikTok content has on users appears to be a more successful form of proselytizing.
"I'm a guerrilla but I'm not bad, as people usually say, because I came to the mountains looking for a way to survive" says the lyrics of El guerrillero, a song by El Charrito Negro that some of these contents use. One of the pieces, which has accumulated more than 45,000 reproductions, commemorates a group of five armed and uniformed people, who were apparently killed.
Within the contents analyzed there are at least two relevant narratives. On the one hand, some publications allude to the hard work of the revolutionary struggle and agrarian life -specifically, coca cultivation- and present these activities as an ideal of effort and sacrifice. On the other hand, the contents show an ostentatious life made possible by illegal activities.
There is no apparent coordination or script to position the EMC in TikTok, however, the comments to the videos show their potential for recruitment. To these pieces, users respond with questions for information to join the ranks, express their interest in doing so or express their support for the dissidents.
This phenomenon adds to the strengthening of these structures in certain areas of the country and the increase in forced recruitment. This week, the Colombian National Police reported that during the course of the year more than one hundred minors have been recruited in the country. Among others, the entity identified strategies in social networks to attract children.
TikTok's infrastructure allows these contents to reach a larger number of people. If in Facebook, publications are limited to the circle of the person who publishes them, in TikTok these pieces reach further if they enter the virality engine of this social network: the For You Page.
When reviewing some of the EMC's content on TikTok, the platform itself began to recommend new accounts and publications related to this armed group or to coca crops located in places where it has a presence, such as El Plateado, in the department of Cauca, or Llorente, in the department of Nariño.
The posts by dissident members could be in breach of several of TikTok's content policies. For one, the rules prohibit content that depicts firearms "not used in a safe or appropriate context."
Moreover, the company's security and civility policy prohibits the presence of violent extremist organizations or criminal organizations. According to TikTok, the former are those that use or threaten to use violence against civilians for political or ideological reasons, while the latter are groups that commit serious crimes such as kidnapping or human trafficking.
Although both policies could be applied to these contents, the lack of explicit references to armed groups and the use of slang terms or emojis require sufficient knowledge of the local context to detect that it is indeed a breach.
Sebastian Martinez, a spokesman for the dissidents, told the BBC that there is no intention to promote the EMC on TikTok and that on the contrary they have asked their members not to draw attention to themselves on this platform. However, the official guidelines are at odds with the reality of the members of their ranks: young people who have grown up with access to social networks and who wish to exhibit themselves there.
We talked about this topic on The Documentary, a BBC podcast. You can listen to the full episode here 🎧.
