Quality of Government Information in Ecuador. Messages without Objective for a People that Perseveres, Resists and Publishes

Abstract

In October 2019 Ecuador experienced eleven days of nationwide protest, in view of the government's intention to execute Presidential Decree 883 which, among other things, would apply a gradual increase in the price of fuels. The General Secretariat of Communication of the Presidency (SGCP) issued 18 official communiqués, texts that allow a descriptive-chronological study of the handling of the crisis. The quality of the communiqués is analyzed from the dimensions of Kümpel and Springer (2016): relevance, comprehensibility, diversity, impartiality and accuracy. There was an absence of strategies. The paralysis of the main public services ignited citizen digital alerts; the lack of credibility of the official channel was questioned. Citizens used Facebook and Twitter networks to generate trends contrary to the communiqués, damaging the government's image and consolidating a dispersed citizen activism, but which generated a flow of information, measured through the Fanpage Karma tool.