Key Facts and Figures

• Mexico’s notorious Sinaloa drug cartel has more than 100,000 Twitter followers from around the world.

• About one quarter of the Sinaloa cartel’s social media output presents seductive images of gang life and another 22% contains threatening messages and images of torture, mutilations and executions.

• In 2016, Brazilian authorities arrested a Facebook VP after the company refused to provide investigators access to WhatsApp messages pertinent to a drug-trafficking probe.

• Mexico’s Zetas cartel has used YouTube to broadcast killings and Twitter to announce murdersin one instance tweeting pictures of the corpse from the victim’s own account.

• Mexican drug cartels broadcast "narcocorridos," or drug ballads, on Twitter and YouTube to indicate targeted killings have occurred.

• A video purportedly showing drug cartel members pointing weapons at captured rivals was taken down by YouTube a year after being viewed more than 1.8 million times.

• Los Zetas cartel of Mexico has broadcast murders on social media and has a Facebook universe with approximately 47,000 connected accounts.