In the last hours, the account of Twitter from Alberto Fernandez was again involved in a scandal for a retweet. What did the message the president shared say? “Excellent Cerruti here explaining technically why Argentine mainstream journalism is a national shame”.
The tweet had been published by the user @Exagerardez, an account that has more than 25,000 followers and that in its description says: “It is difficult for us to reach an agreement.” Shortly after performing the RT, the president eliminated him but the revolution had already broken out.
Different media referred to the “attack of Alberto Fernández against Argentine journalism”. The fact escalated in such a way that the opposition itself repudiated the president’s message. Referents such as Patricia Bullrich, Mario Negri, Alfredo Cornejo, Ricardo López Murphy, Graciela Ocaña and Fernando Iglesias, among others, expressed their rejection.
In addition, the Association of Argentine Journalistic Entities (ADEPA) published a tweet about it: “We regret that the President of the Nation, Alberto Fernández, has retweeted a message that described journalism as a ‘national shame’.”
When Albert was anointed by Cristina Fernandez of Kirchner as a candidate for president, his Twitter account exploded. He went on to add 20 followers per minute, going in two days from 68,000 followers to 127,000 and 700,000 by the time he arrived at the Casa Rosada, on December 10, 2019. Today, he has 2,160,740 followers.
For Alberto Fernandez (and for most politicians) “handing over” the Twitter account is an act of vulnerability. In fact, many times, digital political communication consultants have to deal with this battle and use all possible gadgets to try to convince our client.
It seems that Alberto’s communication team got lucky, and the president facilitated access to his Twitter but in exchange, he asked to continue doing RTs and put “Like” wherever he wanted. Objective fulfilled for the advisers: the messages would end at dawn and the greetings from the President in the midst of a pandemic, something that was beginning to generate noise in different journalists.
But the battle was not won. With the president still maintaining access to his social networks, other problems began: the controversial retweets. Yesterday’s was not the only one. In these 27 months, Alberto Fernández shared several messages that filled the pages of newspapers.
When Argentina was in full mandatory quarantine, in April 2020, Alberto Fernández had to go out to explain himself after retweeting: “The milky chubby says in A24 that @alferdez ‘holds on to quarantine for the polls’. Either they did not understand the seriousness of what is happening or they are very bad people. And you can’t be a good journalist being a bad person.”.
After the fallout, the president tweeted: “an unintentional mistake led to an RT from this account about a criticism that I respect, but that contained adjectives that I always think it is better to avoid. When I noticed it in the morning, I deleted that RT. I’m sorry if anyone has been hurt by it.”.
Only a week later, another retweet arrived to make his communication team collapse: he shared an image of the cartoonist Sergio Kohan, who had Alberto Fernández with him. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, vaccinating a gorilla. Days later he had to delete another publication for confusing the Nicaraguan flag with that of Argentina in a United Nations (UN) tweet that explained that only 13 countries have a cabinet of ministers made up of at least 50% women and that Nicaragua headed.
To finish, and bearing in mind that the origin of this column was a tweet in which Gabriela Cerruti, spokesperson for the President, is mentioned, it is worth remembering the intersection that Alberto Fernández had with Cerruti herself back in 2017, on Twitter . Faced with criticism, Alberto replied: “The only one confused is you who were never a Peronist. Earn a bank without chicaning. Not me Gaby”.
