A MEXICAN DRUG cartel has sent a chilling warning to members of the public using social media to criticise its activities – by hanging the mutilated bodies of two young people accused of doing so from a bridge.

The victims, a man and a woman, had been tortured before displayed on the bridge in Nuevo Laredo. Near to them was a sign, which read: “This is going to happen to all of those posting funny things on the Internet,” CNN  reports.

Nobody has yet come forward to claim the bodies of the two victims, who remain unidentified. It will be next to impossible to determine whether they had, in fact, posted material online, the Atlantic Wire reports.

Mexico’s notoriously violent cartels have all but succeeded in forcing the country’s traditional media and politicians into silence; journalists who do report on gang-related crime often become targets of vicious homicides. Some 40 reporters have been confirmed killed since 2004 and many more are still missing, the Washington Post reports.

In this climate of fear, the internet has increasingly been viewed as the last bastion of expression against the horrors committed by cartels.

Popular blog El Blog de Narco and Al Rojo Vivo were both named in the signs. El Blog de Narco covers gang-related crime and Al Rojo Vivo allows readers to post anonymous tips.

Twitter is also being used in the public’s resistance against the cartels.