In early November, Colombian congressman Miguel Polo Polo posted on his social networks a video in which he threw in a garbage bag the rubber boots that the mothers of civilians extrajudicially executed by the security forces -known as 'false positives in Colombia- had installed in Congress as a form of protest and artistic commemoration.
"Who must have paid those alleged peasants who came here to Congress to dirty the Rafael Nuñez square to put these boots on, making apology for the 6,402 false positives?" the representative to the Chamber asks in the video. According to him, the act of removing the boots is justified because the Colombian institutions had not been able to give the names of the 6,402 victims of the 'false positives', a figure included in the final report of the Truth Commission.
For Jacqueline Castillo, spokeswoman for the organization Mothers of False Positives -Mafapo- the act was not only an affront to the pain of the victims, but also part of "a denialist discourse in which they want to claim that the number 6,402 is an invention", as she assured the newspaper El Espectador. In his opinion, this type of controversy is aimed at diminishing the seriousness of the crimes.
The dispute over the number of victims of extrajudicial executions is not new, but the discourse that seeks to controvert it - as a strategy to dismiss the occurrence of these systematic acts altogether - has escalated in recent months. Last September, tweeter Ariel Ricardo Armel posted on X the response to a right of petition in which he asked the Special Jurisdiction for Peace - the transitional justice tribunal created after the 2016 peace agreement - whether it had in its possession 6,402 files related to 'false positives.' In its response, the body indicated that the figure corresponded to a "provisional universe of facts" and that there were therefore no individual files for each case. However, it clarified that it was information registered in databases of the Attorney General's Office, the Historical Memory Center and the Colombia-Europe-United States Coordination.
Despite the explanation, the claim that there were no such number of files was exploited to spread the idea that the court did not recognize that there were such a number of victims. Following Armel's post, other users called the 6,402 figure a lie or a myth.
According to a ColombiaCheck verification, some of these publications accumulated more than 500,000 views on X and migrated to other platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
In response to this new wave of denialist comments, the JEP and the National Center for Historical Memory rejected the stigmatization against the victims and clarified that, through different accusations and the testimonies of 104 perpetrators, it had been proven that there was indeed a policy within the Army that between 2002 and 2008 led to 6,402 murders and disappearances.
X, as well as TikTok, YouTube and Meta platforms prohibit content that denies the occurrence of proven violent events or harasses victims by minimizing their tragedies or mocking them.
Although platform policies are global in scope, their focus is often context-specific. In the case of such rules, many of them are designed directly for conversations about the Holocaust or mass shootings in the United States.
However, its conception presents gaps in relation to events familiar to the Latin American context, such as state terrorism, military dictatorships or armed conflicts, for which historical memory processes have been developed and institutional mechanisms for truth and reparation have been established.
Although many of the publications around the number of 'false positives' in Colombia violate some of the platforms' policies, such as accusing victims of being hired and denying their experience, there are no known sanctions for cases like this or others in the region. It is also unclear whether the removal of this content would be the appropriate remedy, as it could end up indirectly amplifying these types of narratives.
In March of this year, we observed how on the National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice in Argentina, thousands of publications used the hashtags #NoFueron30000 and #NoFueronInocentes to question the numbers of victims of the last military dictatorship in that country, to relativize the deaths and disappearances or even to justify these events. As part of the conversation, the mothers and grandmothers of May were also attacked, who were pointed out as relatives of terrorists.
Last year in Chile, on the 50th anniversary of the coup d'état against Salvador Allende's government, the events of the dictatorship began to be discussed. According to a report by FactCheck, the figure of Agusto Pinochet was being glorified on TikTok, which would have led to denialist content about the human rights violations committed during that historical period.
Enforcing platform rules regarding denialist content requires a solid foundation of context that moderators do not always have. But beyond that, in some cases, such as X, the decision not to enforce them is notorious. To cite a telling fact, in December last year Elon Musk, owner of the platform, reinstated the account of Alex Jones, who by then had already been convicted of defaming the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, the occurrence of which he presented for years as a staged event.