politician: Rafael Moreno Valle, the former governor of Puebla, is now neck-and-neck with him on Facebook. Only just behind AMLO on Twitter is the mayor of Mexico City, Miguel Angel Mancera. But neither Moreno Valle nor Mancera is going to be a presidential candidate.

Politics on Colombian social media also leans left. There, the leading figure is Gustavo Petro (FB 0.9m, TW 2.8m), the former mayor of Bogotá, who as a young man belonged to the guerrilla group the 19th of April Movement and who made his political reputation as an opponent of the conservative presidency of Álvaro Uribe.

The inescapable threat

It used to be that all politics was local. Today, perhaps, all politics is becoming social, in that social media have emerged as the crucial battleground of modern elections.A leading Bollywood actor Prakash Raj did not mince his words when he said that his colleague in Hindi cinema Amitabh Bachchan is a coward.

Prakash Raj was talking to a local TV journalist Barkha Dutt on Friday when he said that the veteran actor Bachchan is so scared of the Narendra Modi regime that he has maintained a stony silence even on extremely critical issues such as religion-based rapes in India.

He was particularly referring to the recent Kathua rape case in which an 8-year-old girl was kidnapped, gang-raped, and murdered. Prakash Raj – who is a fierce critic of the Modi government – said he had requested Bachchan to stand up and speak out against such cruel incidents, but his request fell on deaf ears.

Although Bachchan is among