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In November 2018, the then-mayor of Bucaramanga (Colombia) attacked a municipal councilor amidst a heated political discussion. The video of the assault spread like wildfire on social media and was used by the Attorney General's Office as reliable evidence to suspend the mayor from office. This article analyzes a set of virtual comments from Internet users in reaction to the video. The corpus was extracted from the post made by the El Tiempo news outlet on YouTube using the YouTube Comment Scraper tool between November 28 and December 28, 2018, to focus on reactions to the political event in the first month. From an interdisciplinary interpretive perspective of discourse analysis, we determined the regularities of these reactions, the ways of explicitly and implicitly justifying acts of violence, and the political effects that ended up favoring the former mayor's public image. The article concludes by inserting the studied case into the current debates on democratic representation and the rise of anti-political ideological matrices in rulers' public discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: to determine the use of the social network Twitter by the councilors of Bucaramanga as public servants and leaders of local opinion, through hyper-textuality, popularity, interactivity, participation, multimediality and interaction. Methodology: Netnography was used with mixed techniques: semi-structured interview and application of Twitter's Global index of Potential Persuasive. Results: It was found that the Council in its public dissemination process uses a website, with updated information about its activities. Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are used, but interaction and use of them are low. Fourteen of the nineteen councilors have a Twitter account, three of them are users, and the content disseminated about their legislative exercise is limited; the published media content is limited, as well as responses and interactions with users. Conclusions: It is concluded that the immersion in public communication of digital platforms and social networks is advancing to guide and disseminate politics, and more from the legislative field. This aspect has been already understood by local and global rulers. The councilors, who participated in this research, felt resistant towards the use of Twitter to focus on issues unrelated to their role as councilors and as such, miss a great opportunity in the use of microblogging, to make proposals related to social affairs, and to contribute from their Twitter account to consolidate their image and validity within the public and electoral sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]