[andresmh]

Somewhat related story: During the Mexican presidential election mentioned in the article, a PhD student at one of the top Computer Science departments in the U.S. got in touch with me (through a shared friend) because he saw I was doing research on Mexican civic tech.

He mentioned that while he was teaching a workshop at his university, two of the workshop participants, who were employees of a powerful Mexican TV network, asked him to help them discredit or deflect the student movement described in the article (the movement was called the "Mexican spring" at the time for their use of social media).

This sounded shady to the student, and he wanted to tell someone, but didn't know who. Ultimately he just avoided the TV folks for the rest of the workshop.

Weeks later, The Guardian published some leaked documents that showed nefarious ties between said TV network and the then candidate.

The student connected with the press then, but the story never came out. Perhaps he got cold feet, or maybe the journalists didn't think it was interesting enough.