The wave of accounts arriving at the forum before Spain's July 23 election

The wave of accounts arriving at the forum before Spain's July 23 election

The early election call has a side effect that doesn't show up in the polls: the mobilization of accounts aligned with the parties in political discussion spaces. An opening post in the Current Affairs subforum names and lists what it describes as an upcoming wave of new and reactivated profiles, warning that the usual four critics will be diluted among them. The author's thesis is that the operation is already underway: freshly created accounts and others that had long been dormant have started posting with a coordination that doesn't look spontaneous.

The list accompanying the post — some twenty names, grouped in two blocks — is presented as a map of profiles to mute. The author claims most are multis (multiple accounts) of a handful of earlier ones, an accusation that goes unproven within the thread itself: nobody provides screenshots, IP logs or anything to back it up. It's the weakest part of the argument and, at the same time, the one that has gained the most traction.

What is expected of the new accounts

The most repeated prediction in the thread isn't about fake accounts, but about discourse pivots. The expectation is that profiles will appear presenting themselves as disappointed VOX voters, saying they've changed their minds over the party's direction and, in practice, pushing toward abstention or tactical voting for the PP. The reading is that behind that narrative are the parties' community managers, not real voters.

The same scheme is applied in the opposite direction: it's taken for granted that there will be a counteroffensive of profiles aligned with the Government bloc. The result, in this view, is a duel of communications teams in which citizen conversation becomes mere backdrop. Some sum it up wryly: ordinary people, watching the show.

Ignore or reply: the underlying debate

The proposal to create a mute list gets an immediate response. Part of the thread rejects it outright and argues the opposite: not to ignore, but to reply to every message, use the noise as debate practice and then take those arguments into real life. A quote from The Godfather about keeping your enemies close appears as an argument, which gives a sense of the tone.

Against that stance, the practical majority opts for selective ignoring. The argument is one of attention economics: if the volume of coordinated accounts grows, replying to each one becomes unpaid work. The disagreement isn't resolved in the thread and probably never will be.

The three topics that sneak into any discussion

When the thread moves from strategy to substance, three issues come up as the only ones that matter ahead of the election: housing, Ceuta and corruption. On the first, they ask how the PSOE (Spain's Socialist Party) plans to solve it; on the second, whether one is in favor of irregular migration; on the third, how long a PP government would last given the corruption cases attributed to it. These are questions thrown into the air, with no data to back them.

The thread doesn't develop them. They work more as an agenda reminder than as analysis. And there lies the underlying problem: the complaint about the mass arrival of opinion accounts coexists with a discussion that, in many stretches, reproduces the same slogans attributed to those accounts.

The cautious prediction is this: if the volume of new profiles is confirmed in the coming weeks, the forum will gain traffic and lose signal. The part nobody has measured — how many of those accounts are coordinated and how many are simply angry voters — will remain the unknown that decides whether the complaint was right.