From Online to Offline: Mexican Cartels’ Recruitment Tactics Through Social Media

 

Rohan Iyer

July 15, 2026

 

Over the course of two months, the National Security Policy Center’s 2026 summer intern cohort conducted research on critical national security issues on behalf of UVA’s National Security Data and Policy Institute (NSDPI). The group’s work culminated in individual white papers on topics approved by NSDPI supervisors. Undergraduate researcher Rohan Iyer’s white paper, “From Online to Offline: Mexican Cartels’ Recruitment Tactics Through Social Media,” outlines policy options for curtailing online cartel recruitment efforts.

 

Executive Summary

In order to maintain their sizable and often decentralized operations, Mexican cartels rely on an extraordinarily high recruitment rate for their forces. To accomplish this, cartels have increasingly been turning to social media as a means to reach a wider audience, particularly youth who use these platforms. These social media posts, disseminated by cartel-affiliated accounts, often explicitly advertise opportunities for “work.” Furthermore, they romanticize life in organized crime to their audience, thus enticing viewers to reach out to join. Despite efforts by social media platforms to remove these posts and the accounts that make them, cartels prove to be adept at circumventing AI content moderation software, either by obscuring the nature of their posts or by creating new accounts when one is banned. Additionally, the “engagement optimization” algorithms that social media platforms use to draw in and retain users serve to exacerbate this issue and enable harmful posts to spread to wider audiences. Even though such recruitment occurs outside of U.S. territory and jurisdiction, there are several policy options available to U.S. policymakers to combat this phenomenon: 1) help social media platforms improve their content moderation capabilities; 2) pressure companies to change content recommendation algorithms; 3) investigate, implement, and facilitate new opportunities for direct investment into economic development in Mexico.

 

Research Placemat:

From Online to Offline: Mexican Cartels’ Recruitment Tactics Through Social Media

 

White Paper:

From Online to Offline: Mexican Cartels’ Recruitment Tactics Through Social Media