Transmedia Context and Twitter As Conditioning the Ecuadorian Government’s Action. The Case of the “Guayaquil Emergency” During the COVID-19 Pandemic

47 Tripodos 2020 | 47 | VOL. 2 Tripodos, number 47, vol. 2 | 2020 | 47-68 ISSN: 1138-3305 Transmedia Context and Twitter As Conditioning the Ecuadorian Government’s Action. The Case of the “Guayaquil Emergency” During the COVID-19 Pandemic Arturo Luque Technical University of Manabí (Ecuador) and Rey Juan Carlos University (Spain) Francesco Maniglio Fernando Casado Technical University of Manabi (Ecuador) Jorge García-Guerrero University of Córdoba (Spain) Received: 30/04/20 Accepted: 22/06/20 Communication ecosystems have multiplexed and increased their capacity to act, distort, and fight. COVID-19 pandemic and the response of the Ecuadorian Government to it are clear examples of the power of media to erode, to influence, and also to produce fake news. In this context, Twitter has become more than just a social platform, as it helped spread catastrophic pictures of the country, especially of Guayaquil. This article analyzes the tweets posted by the main domestic and global media and by the Ecuadorian government accounts since the outbreak of the pandemic in Ecuador, as well as the interrelations among them and their polarity score. The aim is to show how the government changed its action plan by focusing on exogenous elements that had been excluded from its (pre)established strategy, which consisted in neglecting and deliberately minimizing a situation that turned out to be more serious than officially deemed and that was exposed by unofficial global media. Keywords: Twitter, social network, mass media, impact, COVID-19, Ecuador. The first COVID-19 case in Ecuador was officially reported on February 29, 2020. Patient zero had arrived from Spain a few days earlier. The controversial response of the government to the crisis can be considered to have started the following day, when former Health Minister Catalina Andramuño held a press conference and disclosed that five more people might have been infected ARTURO LUQUE, FRANCESCO MANIGLIO, FERNANDO CASADO, JORGE GARCÍA-GUERRERO Tripodos 2020 | 47 | VOL. 2 48 with COVID-19. Only then did these people, who were patient zero’s relatives, find out that they were infected. The Ministry of Health never reached out to them (AFP, 2020). From that moment onward, the disease started to spread all over Ecuador. By April 21, 2020, according to official figures, there were 10,398 people infected, 520 deaths and 1207 recovered cases in the country (Expreso, 2020). Since mid-March, Ecuador has been the South American country with the highest number of COVID-19 infections and deaths per capita. By April 2020, Guayaquil accounted for 68.4% of the cases, thus becoming the epicenter of the pandemic in the country (Millán, 2020). Graphic 1, “Official Deaths,” shows the COVID-19 death toll, including both confirmed and unconfirmed cases (the latter developed symptoms compatible with COVID-19) in Guayaquil. In spite of the lockdown measures, the death rate has increased dramatically, which casts doubt on the strategies implemented and the resources earmarked for flattening the COVID-19 curve. Chart 1. Official Deaths in Guayaquil Source: Personal research. The COVID-19 pandemic “Guayaquil Emergency” case was triggered by the end of March, when all sorts of Dantean pictures started to spread through Twitter and instant messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram: people begging to have the corpses of their relatives removed from their houses, corpses burning in the streets, shroud-covered corpses left on the sidewalk (YouTube, 2020a). These morbid scenes captured by witnesses became viral almost immediately after being picked up and published by both domestic and global media. The purpose of this study is to analyze how the stories in social platforms, especially Twitter, have influenced the main domestic and global media, which picked them up and turned them into actual news during Guayaquil’s health crisis. This situation led to the reinforcement and legitimization of the information posted on social plat- TRANSMEDIA CONTEXT AND TWITTER AS CONDITIONING THE ECUADORIAN GOVERNMENT’S ACTION… 49 Tripodos 2020 | 47 | VOL. 2 forms, thus expanding their role in shaping public opinion and imposing a new political and media agenda on the government, which was coaxed into adapting its discourse and actions in response to COVID-19. Firstly, this article offers a heterodox reflection on the effects of the so-called transmedia technologies (Bertetti, 2014; Jansson, 2013) and the construction of transmedia narratives around Guayaquil’s health crisis. Secondly, it focuses particularly on the effects of specific forms of “technopolitical action” (Caballero and Gravante, 2017; Milan and Gutiérrez, 2018) and on the setting of the media’s agenda and its impact on the public actions carried out by Lenín Moreno’s administration. Thirdly, the article includes a topic and semantic analysis of social network multimedia (Ahmed et al., 2019; Kwon et al., 2016; Drieger, 2013) to account for (a) the significant correlation and convergence (Hassler-Forest and Nicklas, 2015) between the “Guayaquil Emergency” denouncing tweets and the setting of domestic and global media agendas b) the influence of the Ecuadorian government on communication and political action through the plotting of a correlation with the main events in the timeline. TRANSMEDIA TECHNOLOGIES. BACKGROUND The global development of the information society in the 90’s and the implementation of information and communication technologies (ICT) in contemporary societies have unequivocally reshaped the relationship and boundaries between information and narrative forms. Journalism itself has changed by appropriating news stories and narratives that do not come strictu sensu from journalism but from economic or institutional sectors and from social and political activism through new media and communicative forms. It was in this context at the beginning of the century when the first studies on transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, 2003) emerged to show the shift from the Gramscian concept of consent to the concept of “cultural convergence” (Jenkins, 2014), which states that different elements of a narrative get dispersed across multiple delivery channels and create a unified and coordinated story. The theory of “transmedia storytelling” has gained enormous ground in the academic field leading to numerous studies, like cross-media or multi-platform journalism (Erdal, 2009), or multi-modality in discourse analysis (Baecchi et al., 2016; Mayr, 2016; Casado, 2015; Philips, 2013). Neira (2014), for instance, resorts to the multi-modal approach to analyze the transmedia mobilization of Chilean students, considered to be “useless” and “subversive”, on social networks, and show how “students subvert and turn dominant representations in their favor through consecutive intertextual and re-contextualization practices”. The contextualized transmedia mobilization framework is also used in studies on media practices during the Umbrella Movement; it rejects “a social media-centralist framework, and, rather, calls for an integrated approach to media, which facilitates a resurrection of the concept of media ecology” (Lin, 2017: 66). Other studies focus on hybrid media and tackle the issue of technological innovation (Kimmel, Kleiman, and Miller, 2015), the metamorphosis of political power (Chadwick, 2017) and the fac- ARTURO LUQUE, FRANCESCO MANIGLIO, FERNANDO CASADO, JORGE GARCÍA-GUERRERO Tripodos 2020 | 47 | VOL. 2 50 tors affecting hybrid communication practices (Louho, Kallioja, and Oittinen, 2006), like the strategies used for Trump’s media campaign (Wells et al., 2016). Currently, in social sciences, the transmedia approach is becoming increasingly relevant due to its role in sociopolitical activism as “transmedia testimonio”, “in which activists give accounts of their immigration experiences, reveal their legal status, and document their participation in civil disobedience” (Zimmerman, 2016), or in racial and ethnic studies focused, among other things, “on how racial minorities are actively adapting, resisting, and challenging the practices of mainstream media in a convergence era” (Ramasubramanian, 2016). This approach, thus, is used as a “subversive tool” that crosses and connects multiple media narrative threads, genres, and forms, and undermines and overwrites corporate uses of the same term (Chen and Olivares, 2014: 246). The Guayaquil crisis is studied from the overarching approach of transmedia technology (Jansson, 2013) in order to highlight the diversity of transmedia narratives, the fact that stories may be told, and participants may be engaged in many different ways. Furthermore, we want to stress that the potential of the narrative itself (in terms of aesthetics, cognition, affection, and appreciation) strongly conditions the domestic and global media agendas. Actually, several studies have shown how transmedia storytelling has influenced journalism (Larrondo-Ureta, 2016) by introducing new ways of communicating information (Scolari, 2014) and exploring genres and interface designs (Serrano-Tell- ería, 2016), which leads to new ways of political communication (Moya, 2020), as can be seen in the construction of President Puigdemont’s political discourse during the Catalan independence process (López-López, Romero-Ortega, and Ramos-Gil, 2018). TECHNOPOLITICS, SOCIAL NETWORKS AND MEDIA AGENDA SETTING Continuity of meaning does not necessarily imply absence of conflict or neutrality in terms of communication. In order to avoid oversimplification, the transmedia technologies context must be narrowed down with the aid of technopolitics (Kahn and Kellner, 2007) to highlight that convergent processes of meaning are not linear but complex, and are composed of disputes and tensions, not only regarding meaning but also, and most importantly, regarding politics. The media’s agendas are marked by processes of dispute, correlation and convergence among media groups, financial oligopolies, governments and international governance organizations (Weiss and Wilkinson, 2014). These are the processes that take place when the governments spread messages and counteracts exogenous attacks by the opposition, foreign governments, local opposing administrations or simply rival corporate media. In these technopolitical processes, the new technologies that feed themselves from big data exploitation have changed the dynamics of public attention. The relationship between the news approach of traditional media and social networks is not mechanical (Russell-Neuman et al., 2014), but one rather specific to social net- TRANSMEDIA CONTEXT AND TWITTER AS CONDITIONING THE ECUADORIAN GOVERNMENT’S ACTION… 51 Tripodos 2020 | 47 | VOL. 2 works, based on concepts like affection, that substantially influence and condition the public opinion. Conditioning Influences on Twitter At present, there are new flexible communication tools with hardly any costs for participation and access. These tools contribute to the massive spread of messages and allow users to stay ahead of breaking news, refute them or spread them. They also allow for opinions to change within a short time span and for the implementation of specific strategies far from what is considered to be “correct”. The social impact generated by social networks is increasingly apparent (Murthy, 2018). Messages spread all over multiplexed networks, which amplify their dissemination and show their systemic coexistence (Boccaletti et al., 2014). By using these networks intentionally, citizens, politicians, companies, communication agencies and perfectly designed algorithms amplify and disseminate messages with the purpose of having specific effects on public opinion (Boulianne, 2009; Kenski and Stroud, 2006). On Twitter, people (and bots) who post specific information have the capacity of convincing a great number of users before receiving confirmation from the original source or communication media (Hu et al., 2012). Uncertainty and lies can be accepted as truths. That is the reason why Twitter has become such an essential and widely used tool (Parmelee and Bichard, 2011), which has been characterized as an informational medium rather than a social network (Kwak et al., 2010). Twitter has three features that facilitate communication: 1) mentions 2) retweets 3) hashtags, which allow for answers and online interaction at different levels to the point of holding a conversation (Lovejoy, Waters, and Saxton, 2012; Small, 2011). Mentions have a direct impact on the count of retweets and user retweeting behavior (Pramanik et al., 2017). Also, retweet cascades influence tweet popularity and, consequently, the amplification of impact (Cheng et al., 2014). Politicians can communicate with much of the population without the intervention of journalists, which explains why Twitter has become such a widely used platform both in political debates and daily communication (Gaumont, Panahi, and Chavalarias, 2018; Kruikemeier, 2014). Information, opinions and all kinds of actions (related to commerce, impact, and so on) are posted and, from that moment onward, become conditioning for other agents. For example, viral pictures showing corpses piling up in the streets during the “Guayaquil Emergency” had a strong influence capacity and played a key role in the media’s narrative. However, social network conglomerates should not be seen as representatives of a more egalitarian and democratic way of sharing information. On the contrary, in the field of algorithmic economics, an emphasis has been made on the marketing of data generated by users themselves at no cost (Pasquinelli, 2014). Data have become social platforms most valued asset, since they can be sold to the highest bidder, not always in an ethical manner or with peaceful purposes (Morozov, 2015). That is the reason why algorithms are not public and are subject to censorship (direct or indirect) enforced by Twitter itself; besides, there is no regulation forcing social platforms to show data transactions and ARTURO LUQUE, FRANCESCO MANIGLIO, FERNANDO CASADO, JORGE GARCÍA-GUERRERO Tripodos 2020 | 47 | VOL. 2 52 outsourcing, which on some occasions is carried out without consent, as the Cambridge Analytica1 scandal has shown. The distortion of reality is introduced as a new weapon in political war. Everything can go viral on Twitter (Esser and Strömbäck, 2014; Hepp, 2012; Lundby, 2009). Journalists lead the spread of information and hashtags, organizing the political agenda and bypassing politicians, who find themselves forced to follow their example in order to boost their Twitter presence (Enli and Simonsen, 2018). These processes influenced the political and economic crisis that Ecuador is facing during COVID-19 pandemic. According to Chomsky (2020), “the pattern of simply making one statement today, contradicting it tomorrow, coming out with something else the next day is really brilliant […] you tell constant lies, what happens is the concept of truth just disappears”. Twitter is a clear example of impact through the number of followers, likes, and retweets, as well as other deeper features like the polarity score applied to words and chunks of text (Pandarachalil, Sendhilkumar, and Mahalakshmi, 2015; Esuli and Sebastiani, 2006). The sentiment involved in both what is said and what is omitted are also analyzed (Hridoy et al., 2015; Khan, Bashir, and Qamar, 2014). SEMANTIC NETWORK ANALYSIS AND AGENDA SETTING. THE CASE OF THE “GUAYAQUIL EMERGENCY” A study on the Katrina catastrophe brought to the fore the importance of the network paradigm in disaster contexts as it sheds light on how crises cause change in social networks, and how those changes may or may not facilitate recovery, as a function of the kinds of changes that occur (Varda et al., 2009). Murthy and Longwell (2013) analyzed the use of twitter during the 2010 Pakistan floods and examined whether users moved from traditional or social media sources to tweet/retweet links, thus highlighting the legitimization power of the latter. In disaster contexts, semantic analysis, under this network paradigm, shows high convergence rates between social media and traditional sources. The relationship between social media legitimization power and influence can be identified on two agenda setting levels for Twitter (Ceron, Curini, and Lacus, 2016). These levels may converge considerably in emergency contexts, when images become particularly harsh, sordid and spectacular, as was the case during the “Guayaquil Emergency”. Liu, Lai, and Xu (2018), for instance, used a semantic network analysis to explain tweeting patterns during the Hurricane Harvey and government strategy changes as a response to crisis, by comparing recurring topics over the disaster timeline. In the similar way, in the case of the “Guayaquil Emergency,” the aim is to identify, analyze and visualize the most influential social media 1 5 keys to understanding the Cambridge Analytica scandal that caused Facebook to lose US $ 37,000 million in one day. Source: BBC.com, 2020/03/21. <https://www.bbc.com/ mundo/noticias-43472797>. TRANSMEDIA CONTEXT AND TWITTER AS CONDITIONING THE ECUADORIAN GOVERNMENT’S ACTION… 53 Tripodos 2020 | 47 | VOL. 2 topics and predicates, their adoption by media agendas, and their influence on the Government’s communicative action. Contextualization of Events When the health emergency was officially declared on March 11, 2020, the first circulation restrictions were announced and massive events were banned (You- Tube, 2020b). On March 15 borders were closed to foreigners and, on the next day, to Ecuadorians, and international flights were cancelled (El Comercio, 2020). The banning of inbound flights, coupled with only a small fleet of planes available for the repatriation of Ecuadorian citizens stranded abroad, has left a great number of people in a defenceless and vulnerable situation. At the same time, the few flights allowed by the government could not be considered to be humanitarian since tickets had to be paid, unlike what happened in many other countries. People who were repatriated and forced to spend 14 days in hotel quarantine had to pay the fees, which sometimes were above market value (El Universo, 2020b). On March 17 the government announced night-time curfews from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. with the purpose of completely restricting unjustified movement. Since the number of infected people and deaths kept increasing, the curfew was extended from 2 p.m. to 5 a.m. on March 24 (El Comercio, 2020). The inexperienced action of Ecuadorian authorities during the health emergency, as well as the lack of resources and the neglect of sick people with symptoms compatible with COVID-19 and people who were still living with their deceased relatives, became high impact international news. On March 19, during the first days of emergency, when inbound flights had already been restricted, Mayor of Guayaquil Cynthia Viteri decided to stop the landing of two repatriation flights from Europe by blocking the runway with cars and trucks. Both planes, from KLM and Iberia, carried only crew members. When faced with criticism, the mayor claimed that she would do it again “a thousand times” (EFE, 2020). The Ecuadorian Public Prosecutor’s Office started an investigation that has shown no results so far, which proves that the Prosecutor’s Office is just an appendix of the Ecuadorian Government. In the midst of the crisis, Health Minister Catalina Andramuño resigned alleging lack of resources and budget (Rosero, 2020). This decision created a big scandal among Ecuadorian ministers. Minister of Economy Richard Martínez contradicted Andramuño’s claims and stated that there were enough resources (Primicias, 2020). However, Andramuño’s resignation sowed seeds of distrust in Ecuador’s public opinion. It was also Martínez who informed on March 24, as the health emergency worsened, that Ecuador would cancel 2020 debt bonds for US$ 325 millions (Tapia, 2020). The payment of the foreign debt was heavily criticized, since the lack of sanitary resources for the population and the health staff in the face of COVID-19 had become apparent by that time (Valencia, 2020). By the end of March, Dantean images depicting Ecuador’s reality started to spread all over social media: people begging to have corpses removed from their houses, corpses burning in the streets, shroud-covered corpses left on the ARTURO LUQUE, FRANCESCO MANIGLIO, FERNANDO CASADO, JORGE GARCÍA-GUERRERO Tripodos 2020 | 47 | VOL. 2 54 sidewalk, giant fridges used as mobile morgues (YouTube, 2020a). These morbid scenes captured by witnesses became viral almost immediately after being picked up and published by both domestic and global media outlets. On April 2, the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, voicing Ecuadorian newspaper El Universo stated that only in Guayaquil there were “almost 450 corpses on the waiting list to be collected from their houses” (Mur, 2020). These deaths were not included in the official COVID-19 deaths figure, and there were disparities in the way the data were published. Actually, The New York Times (2020) suggests that Ecuador’s death toll is 15 times higher than its official tally of coronavirus deaths and points out that “the true scale of the crisis has largely been obscured”. The extent to which the Ecuadorian authorities have been overwhelmed by Ecuador health emergency is directly proportional to their dismantling of the health system and their application of regressive public policies. In an exclusive interview, former Ombudsman Ramiro Rivadeneira expressed that the Ecuadorian 2008 Constitution states that “National state health expenditure be increased by not less than 0.5% of the GDP per year, until reaching at least 4.0% of the GDP”. By 2016, the last year of former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, 4.29% of the GDP was spent in the Health System (Expansión, 2017), compared to 2.78% in 2019 (El Comercio, 2019). These regressive policies, indeed, involved the lay-off of about 3,000 health workers in March 2019, one year before the pandemic (El Universo, 2019a), and the termination of the health agreement with Cuba, so that about 400 Cuban doctors were made to return to their country in November 2019 (El Universo, 2019b). Not only were the authorities unable to assist the victims of the health emergency, but also they failed to correctly enforce social distance measures, despite the existence of a curfew for almost two thirds of the day (El Universo, 2020c). Such impotence resulted in abuses of various kinds by the military and police against people who violated the curfew (El Universo, 2020a). Remarkably, lockdown violations, especially in the most impoverished areas, are related to the lack of public policies for people in a precarious economic situation, based on daily subsistence. The high degrees of informality in the country bear witness to this. In Ecuador, only 38.8% of the economically active population has a formal employment, with figures worsening every year —in 2019 alone, over 115 thousand formal jobs were lost (Silva and Tapia, 2020)—. On top of it all, the current government led by President Lénin Moreno is leading a persecution towards anyone contrary to their wills, who are labelled as Correaist (in a clear allusion to the previous president of the Ecuadorian government) and repeatedly blamed, as a mantra, for all the evils in the country. Thus, in the midst of the pandemic, a campaign against the so-called “Correaist group” has been unleashed. In the first place, they are blamed for the disastrous economic situation, as President Lenin Moreno himself pointed out in his criticisms of his predecessor in his presidential broadcast on March 10 and April 20 (YouTube, 2020c, 2020d). In the second place, they are accused of leading a fake news campaign to destabilize the government (El Telégrafo, 2020). Furthermore, the only courts proceeding that was not interrupted during the health emergency was the one that involved President Rafael Correa and other TRANSMEDIA CONTEXT AND TWITTER AS CONDITIONING THE ECUADORIAN GOVERNMENT’S ACTION… 55 Tripodos 2020 | 47 | VOL. 2 government officials in the so-called “bribery case”, for which he was sentenced to eight years of prison. While the whole court system was closed (by presidential decree), one was surprisingly opened in Quito to sentence the former president. For days on, this mediatically distorting piece of news flooded the front pages and newscasts, inexplicably silencing the sanitary collapse of Ecuador, as well as the government’s disparagement of the COVID-19 WHO recommendations issued months before (Ayala, 2020). Timeline Events The most relevant events in Ecuador during the COVID-19 pandemic are chronologically listed in Table 1, Timeline. Hallmarks include the dismissal of Cuban foreign aid, despite the fact that Ecuador health investment or number of doctors per thousand inhabitants is far below the ratio recommended by the WHO; the performance of a sexist, nurse-denigrating slurring COVID-19 cumbia at the Ambato Hospital; and a series of government decisions and contradictory informations which evince a social and mediatic mismanagement of the crisis. Table 1. Timeline Date Event March 6, 2019 Mass layoffs of health staff are reported in Ecuador. November 12, 2019 The Medical and Scientific Health Cooperation agreement with Cuba, which involved the presence of a large number of Cuban doctors, is terminated, alleging substitution by local staff. March 2, 2020 Ambato Public Hospital teaches precautions against coronavirus by means of a cumbia song.2 February 29, 2020 The “patient zero” is diagnosed with COVID-19. March 10, 2020 Lenin Moreno’s nationwide broadcast, in which he accuses Correaism of the economic situation in Ecuador. March 11, 2020 Official declaration of sanitary emergency in Ecuador. March 15, 2020 Ban on the entry of foreigners to Ecuador. March 16, 2020 The entry of Ecuadorians by air into Ecuador is banned. March 17, 2020 The nightly curfew begins, from 9 pm to 5 am. March 19, 2020 The mayor of Guayaquil, Cynthia Viteri, blocks the city airport and prevents two planes from European companies from landing despite being empty and coming on a repatriation mission. March 21, 2020 The Minister of Health, Catalina Andramuño, resigns. 2 Cumbia at Ambato Hospital available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= xlvID2tk8N8>. ARTURO LUQUE, FRANCESCO MANIGLIO, FERNANDO CASADO, JORGE GARCÍA-GUERRERO Tripodos 2020 | 47 | VOL. 2 62 into a mutual legitimation and reinforcement of both discourses, creating common meanings around the “Guayaquil Emergency”. Similarly, hybridisation and convergence were found between news stories and transmedia storytelling. The impact of these practices has rapidly resulted in the degradation of the government’s communicative action. Neither trying to divert public opinion attention nor remaining silent have sufficed for the government to counteract elements that were exogenous to its logics, i.e., global media, and anonymous people who have witnessed the true reality of the tragic events in Guayaquil. Arturo Luque ([email protected]) is full professor at the Technical University of Manabí, Ecuador, and member of Euro-Mediterra- nean Observatory on Public Policies and Democratic Quality at the Rey Juan Carlos University (Spain). He holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences and Law and a Master of two years about Labor Relations. He supervises several doctoral theses (Ph.D.) in Cordoba (Spain) and in the Basque Country (GEZKI Institute) like a director and co-director. It has 45 indexed articles and his latest publications includes topics about corporate social (ir)responsibility (“How Corporate Social (ir)Responsibility in the Textile Sector Is Defined, and Its Impact on Ethical Sustainability: An Analysis of 133 Concepts”), Transnational Companies (“The Transnational Textile Companies Relationship with Environment: A Delphi Analysis Approach”) and their relations with ethics (“Corruption in the Transnational Textile Industry: An Exception or the Rule?”), social economy and cooperative system like economic alternative (“Socially Responsible Public Management: Case Spinning Development in Ecuador”), media analysis and social conflicts (“Analysis of the Indigenous Uprising of Ecuador, 2019: Between a Measured Legal Response and Lawfare”, 2019). Francesco Maniglio ([email protected]. ec) is full professor at the Technical University of Manabí, Ecuador. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Cultural Criticism at the University of Seville (Spain) and a Master in Philosophy of Law at the University Pablo de Olavide (Spain). He is an associate researcher of the Interdisciplinary Study Group on Communication, Politics, and Social Change (Compoliticas) at the University of Seville and of the Laboratory of Critical Studies of Discourse (LabEC) at the University of Brasilia. His latest publications include “From Productive to Cognitive Dependence: Knowledge-Based Economies and Highly Qualified Migrants in Latin America” (SPE, 2019); “The Global Transformation of University in the Economy of Knowledge Paradigm” (IJSE, 2018); “Brain Drain and Technologies in the Social Justice New Policies of Ecuador” (In B. M. Pirani, Cambridge University Press, 2017); “To Lead Without Governing in the Knowledge Society” (Discourse and Society, 2015). Fernando Casado ([email protected]) is full professor at the Social Science and Humanities at the Technical University of Manabí, Ecuador. He holds a Ph.D in Communition at the University of La Laguna (Spain) and Master’s Degree in Human Rights & Democratisation at the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation (Italy). His TRANSMEDIA CONTEXT AND TWITTER AS CONDITIONING THE ECUADORIAN GOVERNMENT’S ACTION… 63 Tripodos 2020 | 47 | VOL. 2 latest publications include: “Lawfare in Ecuador: The State’s Actions Brought into Disrepute by International Organizations” (2020); “The Struggles of Alternative and Community Media in Venezuela in the Context of Economic Crisis and Possible Armed Conflict” (2020). Jorge García-Guerrero ([email protected]). General director and sub-director of National Statistical Office of Ecuador since 2007 until 2018. He was technical and administrative responsible for the national population and housing census at 2010. 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