“It’s ‘just’ history.” This is the description of user @matrix20.30 on TikTok. His publications extend between August 2022 and November 2024 and in those two years he has uploaded almost 500 videos to his profile, with which he has 63,300 followers and more than one and a half million I like. Most of the videos are extracted from No-Do which, for those who don’t know or haven’t experienced it, was one of the propaganda organs of the Franco regime. Cinemas had a rule of broadcasting these clips in newsreel form before each film, and it was mandatory until shortly before the death of Franco, who celebrated his 50th birthday on Thursday.
TikTok has activated a warning on the “story” spread by said user: “Posts that may be uncomfortable for some people are not available.” Leaving aside the fact that the burden of “discomfort” is placed on the recipients and not on the content, the problem is not that people may feel uncomfortable, but rather that many of these videos are simple apologia for Francoism. Without going further, the first video published in that profile is a phrase from the last part of the Spanish Civil War and the most popular is a clip that the user dates back to 1970 in which he talks about the “ideal woman of Europe”. A woman, of course, who “takes the children to the swimming pool”, then “returns home to prepare the family lunch”, and even if she takes a walk with her husband when “he leaves work”, when “night comes she becomes a mother again to put the little ones to bed”.
“Isn’t it so difficult, with a little love, to be an ideal woman?” concludes the video, which has received 194,000 views. I like, It has been shared more than 28,000 times and has around 6,000 comments, divided between criticism and praise for this sexist example of what a woman should do. The protagonist of the video, Immaculada Martínez, said a few years ago The confidential that the prize for the ideal woman of Europe was an exclusive competition for teachers and, therefore, she worked inside and outside the home, in a school, something that the regime’s propaganda ignored.
The fact that Franco’s propaganda is accessible to everyone on social networks creates a false image in many young people, who begin to think that those speeches are acceptable and to believe falsehoods such as that poverty did not exist, that everyone had a job or that there were no housing problems. Furthermore, for too many young people, as Luz Sánchez-Mellado defined in her Thursday article, “Franco is a mix of meme, myth and pop star with a thin mustache, a fat ass and a whistling voice.”
A sample can be the number of videos that have been published based on one of those shared by the aforementioned user. About 4,500 posts on TikTok contain as audio an excerpt from a No-Do chapter on the dictator’s vacation in San Sebastian in 1947, in which he appears fishing aboard the Goshawk, one of the best known symbols of Franco’s power.
Among these publications there are clips in which the audio is trivialized and used like any other, as if it were the latest viral song. It appears in videos of dances, tricks, minigames on the network itself,… but other users add political intent and, for example, place the audio in a decontextualized comparison of the Franco regime with the current government, in a carousel of photos of a visit to the basilica of the Cuelgamuros valley – which was the dictator’s mausoleum until 2019 – or in video games whose avatar is called Caudillo Franco. Even if it is used for one purpose or another, it does not matter: the simple introduction of that audio will help the platform’s algorithm to send similar content, i.e. Francoist propaganda. And this, in a democracy, is a danger.
