power always places it in the sight of its public. In Colombia, what stood out was the issue of the Peace Agreement with FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People’s Army or FARC-EP, an insurgent guerrilla and terrorist organization of the extreme left wing inspired by Marxist-Leninist political ideology. In Spain, the selection was based on the President’s vote of ‘no confidence’ and the crisis in Catalonia (the proclamation on 10 October 2017 of the establishment of a Catalonian Republic as an independent and sovereign state, based on the rule of law, both in a democratic and social sense). In the United Kingdom, the Brexit initiative (abbreviation of two words in English, Britain and exit, which means the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union), was voted favorably in a referendum on June 23, 2016. A follow-up was carried out by monitoring Heads of State, and even though the posts by Ministers or Secretaries of State was reviewed, these were not included in this work because at the end of the investigation it was no longer considered pertinent. Consideration should be given to the change of President in Spain, as well as the difficulty encountered when not every politician has a social network, in which case the social network of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the Presidential Offices was always revised.

3. Case studies

3.1. The United States

In the first case, it is important to note that the United States is a global actor, and that some issues will consequently be the focus of greater worldwide attention. In addition, in this work attention was paid to the social network acknowledged as the one used by the American president to communicate his actions and decisions directly. Although in the United States Facebook has greater penetration than Twitter, 72% versus 35% (Statista, 2018b), the latter is the network that Trump uses for his communications.

As a first post, Donald Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia is particularly noteworthy. This issue generated many comments, and the reactions that were counted at the time of the cutoff was 36,000. Many of the comments referred to Russia’s alleged interference in the U.S. election campaign and the non-convenience of the meeting, given the findings of U.S. intelligence. Among the comments were opinions about whether or not it was wise to meet, given the U.S. Department of Justice’s accusations against 12 members of Russian intelligence for launching a cyber war against the USA during the 2016 elections. Trump did everything possible to validate his actions, as can be seen in Figures 2 and 3, practically at the same time as the meeting, with a direct communication and almost in real time.