Parties spent more than $100 million on digital strategies between 2024 and this year

Nestor Jimenez

La Jornada Newspaper
Wednesday, December 31, 2025, p. 10

Despite the fact that in the last decade the international scandal related to the dissemination of personal data of Facebook users broke out, and with which the British company Cambridge Analytica developed a decisive social media campaign – according to experts – for Donald Trump to achieve his first presidential victory, political parties in the world and in Mexico have continued to bet on strategies aimed at digital platforms.

Between 2024 and 2025 (with data from the first three quarters), political parties in the country collectively allocated 105 million 461 thousand 218.55 pesos for the creation of content for social networks, advertising guidelines on digital platforms and studies on the population’s reception of said messages. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is the one that spent the most, with just over 51 million pesos.

However, the figure could be much higher, since, without exception, the six parties with national registration have failed to comply for various periods in their transparency reports.

Transform likes in votes

The PRI, for example, contracted courses to “transform likes in votes”, take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and engage in digital “activism”.

The payment of 20 million 880 thousand pesos stands out in a single contract for advertising on social networks with the company Veintiuno Doce, which on its Internet page boasts the services it offered to the government of Enrique Peña Nieto when he was governor of the state of Mexico and then as president of the Republic, as well as for the “digital public image” of Angélica Rivera, ex-wife of Peña Nieto. He also worked for the leadership of the National Action Party (PAN).

In turn, the blue and white hired several companies to carry out “research studies to analyze citizen behavior on social networks.” Through 21 contracts, it allocated at least 11.1 million pesos.

Morena requested a “social network analysis” and advertising on platforms, with contracts totaling almost half a million pesos. Meanwhile, Movimiento Ciudadano has focused on advertising guidelines, creation of jingles and even animations from its national leader, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, under the name “Maynecito”. With 30 contracts, it allocated 19.2 million pesos.

The Green Ecologist Party of Mexico spent 23 million pesos on a dozen contracts, including one for 10 million pesos last year for advertising on digital platforms, coupled with the strategy that that party has used to spread messages through influencersin favor of their candidates, and that have led to constant sanctions.

The Labor Party did not report any contracts of this type, but did not disclose its transparency obligations for several months.

The recent calls for mobilizations awarded to generation Z, which have been pointed out as possible acts promoted by opposition political parties, revived the controversy of the impact that political forces seek with the growing digital communication options, which as one of its characteristics, allows the dissemination of sectorized messages, that is, specifically aimed at certain blocks of the population.

With social networks “you can request that your product be shown to people between 30 and 40 years old, who are probably single and who live, for example, in the south of the city. All of this is shaped through algorithms to be able to identify this target audience,” explained Carlos R. Tlahuel Pérez, Information Security Coordinator of the General Directorate of Computing and Information and Communication Technologies of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

In the documentary The great hackrelated to the Cambridge Analytica case, points out the use of Facebook to direct messages particularly to “undecided” voters. From that case to date, computer and digital tools “are becoming more powerful and more precise,” added Tlahuel Pérez.

Given this scenario, he stressed that the most relevant action that users of digital platforms can take is to discern in greater detail what type of information they receive and separate what may be false or that seeks to induce voting.