A Self-Eating Snake: Half-truths in the Chilean Constituent Process and Lessons for The Content Moderation Debate

Resumen

On December 18th, 2023, a statue of an Ouroboro —a snake eating its own tail— was placed in Chile's capital, symbolizing the country’s failed attempts at constitutional replacement. Despite 78% of initial support in 2019 to replace Pinochet’s constitution, two consecutive proposals were rejected in 2022 and in 2023. Social media played a dual role in this process, enabling citizen participation in constitutional politics and facilitating the spread of tendentious constitutional interpretations. Drawing on Chile’s experience and the most salient contested constitutional interpretations in the process, this article analyzes how the democratic and pluralistic openness of constitutional texts to diverse political visions was vulnerable to widespread accusations of misinformation. Constitutional interpretation is a political endeavor; thus, "half-truthful” interpretations —within constitutional bounds but used to promote a particular vote in the constituent plebiscite— resist standard content moderation approaches. The article structures a regulatory proposal that addresses these challenges without arbitrarily determining interpretative legitimacy or focusing on the content that social media platforms host. These findings and policy recommendations offer crucial lessons for future constituent processes worldwide and contribute to broader debates about content moderation in constitutional politics and the Latin American region.