Media

News of Protests Spread by means of Facebook, Twitter and Other Social Networks

Embed: Interview with Juliano Menegat

The Brazilian protests of June-July 2013 began as a movement of young people, particularly because of the means through which information was shared. Young students like Juliano Menegat (see interview above) gained information about the riots through pages on Facebook like World Riot - 24h and Revolution News, both of which track the progression of various protests around the world. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and a variety of other social media outlets incensed the public at first through a dispensary of upsetting information and then through coverage of the disturbing ways in which the riots were subdued, particularly highlighting the repressive tactics used by the police. For example, the riots were dubbed “vinegar riots” because of the police’s ban of the use of vinegar as a homemade remedy for teargas – an example of the impact the social media outlets had on the way the riots will forever be remembered.

Scholar Alfredo Saad-Filho identifies how events organized on Facebook allowed protestors to “[pull] in localized movements of poor communities demanding improvements to their neighborhoods” (Saad-Filho, 659) as well as incite reactions from middle-class citizens. The universality promoted by social media as well as the often lack of a particular leader led to a point where the demands of the protests became too disunified. Saad-Filho identifies a phenomenon which he calls the “Facebookization of protest” where “anyone could come up with a personal statement about the state of the nation” (Saad-Filho, 659). However, realizing that a lack of focus seemed to delegitimize their demands, protestors made their causes clear through the social media.

This video by a group called Anonymous Brazil identifying the movement’s five main demands and various Facebook pages devoted to the same thing began to unify protestors and change the way the media perceived the movement (Recuero). Three scholars, Raquel Recuero and his two colleagues Fabio Malini and Marco Bastos conducted a study of the unity of the movement by graphing uses of certain hashtags on Twitter.

The graph (see left) shows the usage of the hashtag “#protestRJ” on Twitter at the height of the protest activity. Image found in Recuero’s blogpost, cited at the end of this post.

The mainstream media, at first sympathetic with the government, initially portrayed the protestors negatively, but mid-June, the right-wing mainstream press “[sensed] an opportunity to embarrass the federal government” and began to support the movement (Saad-Filho, 659). These news outlets “called people to the streets and… sponsored the multiplication and de-radicalization of their demands” (Saad-Filho, 658). Large American and international news outlets like CNN and The Guardian provided various means for protestors to publish images of the uprisings directly to their far-reaching pages.

Yet Juliano Menegat, above, still expresses his distrust of mainstream media and relies on Facebook pages and YouTube videos for unbiased and consistent coverage of the events. And later this year, he plans to watch on Facebook for when events protesting the FIFA World Cup and later the 2016 Summer Olympics finally allow him to express his ever-rising discontent.

 References:

Saad-Filho, Alfredo. "Mass Protests under ‘Left Neoliberalism’: Brazil, June-July 2013." Critical Sociology. no. 5 (2013): 657-669.

Recuero, Raquel. "Social Media, Citizen Media, Online Tools Are Shaping Brazil’s Protests and Politics." dmlcentral: Digital Media + Learning: The Power of Participation, June 28, 2013, http://dmlcentral.net/blog/raquel-recuero/social-media-citizen-media-online-tools-are-shaping-brazil%E2%80%99s-protests-and-politi

Also see: 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/21/brazil-protest-social-media

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/18/world/americas/brazil-protests/