Post-truth on Twitter and its influence during the campaign for the rejection of the peace agreements in Colombia in 2016

Post-truth is a term that gained popularity around the world due to the electoral results of Brexit, the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and the plebiscite for Peace in Colombia in 2016. This concept, although it was not born with these events, it has been studied and investigated since then. Along with the post-truth also the role of social networks, in these electoral days, has been the subject of research by different academics. This work sought to show and analyze the influence of post-truth on Twitter during the campaign for the rejection of the peace agreements in Colombia. For the development of this research, the context of the Colombian conflict was briefly presented and how the peace agreements with the FARC guerrillas were reached. Then, different approaches to the phenomenon of post-truth were presented and the concept was defined. The evolution of the internet until the arrival of web 2.0 and how social media have become an important source of information was presented as well. It was shown why social media platforms facilitate the dissemination of post-truth and how this phenomenon has been used in political campaigns. To finalize and fulfill the objective of this research, the two most influential politicians from each of the campaigns for the plebiscite in Colombia were selected: Former president and then senator Alvaro Uribe Velez, for the NO campaign, and President Juan Manuel Santos, for the YES campaign. Using the TWINT data extraction tool, the tweets produced by them in the month prior to the voting were recovered and the Power BI artificial intelligence tool was used to process the information to be analyzed under the light of post-truth. After conducting the analysis, it was found that for the NO campaign, specifically for Uribe, Twitter was an important tool to disseminate information, while for the yes campaign it was not. It was found that of the information shared by Uribe on his Twitter account, at least 21% contained post-truth and that these tweets had 214% more influence on Twitter users, compared to the tweets published by Santos and related to the plebiscite.