Fake Profiles, Bots, and Trolls as Indignant Citizens: Digital Paranoia in the Indignados Movement

In the last decade there has been a remarkable surge of research on the digital media practices of social movements. The current paper contributes to this growing body of literature by exploring a well-known empirical case – the Indignados movement in Spain – from an unusual perspective. Expanding theoretical reflections on the “dark side of digital politics” (Treré, 2016), the paper explores techno-conspiracies and digital paranoia among Indignados protesters. On the basis of in-depth analysis of activists documents, I outline four main technology-related accusations that reveal strong disagreements within the movement. These four accusations are: 1. Certain right-wing activists among the Indignados have created fake profiles to infiltrate the discussions of leftist-anarchists; 2. Certain activists have deliberately trolled the discussions of groups they did not agree with; 3. Certain activists have hijacked the Facebook page of Democracia Real Ya!; 4. Certain activists use bots to up-vote their comments on Plaza Podemos on Reddit. Techno-conspiracies and digital paranoia clearly reveal the hidden tensions in Los Indignados between the left and the right, between horizontality and demands for a vertical structure. The analysis of activists texts shows the importance of understanding friend-enemy relations within the same movement, but at the same time the necessity to develop a concept of the political that goes beyond the friend-enemy distinction and reflects the ability of activists to forgive, compromise, and find a common way forward.