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A digital movement for citizen conversation

Mutante is a “digital movement for citizen conversation” working in Latin America to create alternatives to face polarization, fake news, “click tyranny” and “public agendas” manufactured by private interests. 

Focusing on gender, human rights, mental health and the environment, Mutante practices what they call “participative journalism,” calling on audiences to actively talk about their problems, building a public agenda collectively. 

María Paula Murcia, Analysis and Impact Editor at Mutante, told us:

The Mutante Foundation starts from the idea that journalism should not be unilateral in the sense of producing information for people who consume it, but [who] do not feel compelled by or do not respond to this information. 

Rather …We understand the people who consume this information as agents. They are sources … whose stories are just as legitimate to those that one finds, for example, in traditional reporting. 

In that way we build participatory journalism from the social media platforms, which are the basis of our information infrastructure.

Mutante’s methodology prioritizes “weaving relationships and links with people” and it encompasses three phases:

  •  Hablar (where they collect stories, opinions, and responses from the audiences’ perspectives)
  •  Comprender (where they invite experts to contribute evidence), and 
  • Actuar (where they roll out actions and content that empower citizens to do something about the issues they’re facing). 
Starting where people are

During Mutante’s first couple of years, they chose not to have a website, but rather focused on building a relationship with their audiences on the platforms and in the spaces that were most commonly used: 

At the beginning …. we chose to be where the people were. In the end, building an audience that migrates to a web page from the mainstream social media platforms is very complex. So we did it the other way around: first we built an audience on social media platforms, mainly on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and from there we built a website.

Mutante promotes conversations around gender issues, mental health, climate emergency and human rights. 

At the time we spoke to them for this research, Mutante were promoting conversations to amplify the understanding of human mobility due to climate causes in Colombia and to expose inequalities behind energy poverty in Colombian islands, and they have continued to create spaces for dialogue about the impacts of the climate emergency.

You can find some examples of these conversations below: