Datafolha: Population approves cancellation on social networks – 06/29/2023 – Tech

Brazilians are mostly in favor of canceling those who make alleged mistakes in the digital environment. According to a Datafolha survey, 67% totally or partially agree with the phrase “People talk more than they should on the internet and that’s why they deserve to be canceled when they make a mistake”. About 31% disagreed with the statement.

The rate of those who approve rises to 75% among those aged 60 or over; for 76% among those with primary education; and for 71% among those earning up to two minimum wages.

Datafolha surveyed 2,010 people aged 16 or over across the country. Only responses from respondents who said they accessed the internet (1,908) were considered. The margin of error is two percentage points.

The conclusion does not surprise youtuber and content creator Dora Figueiredo, 29, who has already suffered a harsh cancellation after posting a joke on the internet when she mistakenly received a bakery delivery.

Used to receiving gifts from her followers, Dora was not surprised when a package arrived at her building one morning in November 2020. But, after eating one of the cheese breads, she saw a note with an apology addressed to someone else.

In Instagram stories, she praised the quality of the food and joked about the recipient’s forgiveness. At dawn, a comment problematizing the episode changed the hitherto good-humoured reception from Internet users.

Dora began to be accused of ideological falsehood and exposure of other people’s intimacy, in addition to having her character questioned. She says that she tried to contact the motoboy who made the delivery, the app, the bakery and the owner of the order, without success.

The influencer lost 54 thousand of the 814 thousand followers on the social network. “Since then, my account never grew properly. I had post-traumatic stress disorder, wanted to kill myself and stopped working for a while. To this day I say ‘hi’ on Twitter and people say ‘look at that breakfast thief ‘.”

For psychoanalyst Melissa Bottrel, the great support of Brazilians for the cancellation goes through the low tolerance with those who have different opinions. “On the internet, if someone says something, it’s recorded as if that something were the whole person.”

In the view of Clara Becker, co-founder of the NGO Redes Cordiais, the situation is also a consequence of the polarization in the country. “A huge percentage think that people who think differently are not worth talking to.”

The non-profit organization has been in existence since 2018 and seeks to reduce hate and misinformation on the internet through media education. At first, the NGO focused precisely on digital influencers, with training so that they could identify fake news and respond to haters without escalating the discussion.

It is necessary, however, to differentiate between tolerance of a different opinion and violent speeches. “When you subscribe to any social network, disinformation and hate are prohibited, but companies cannot enforce their own rules. Everything that is a crime outside the internet is a crime inside”, says Becker.

It is one thing to silence a subject because he is a criminal and another thing are the cancellations that occur due to power and visibility disputes, says Issaaf Karhawi, a researcher in digital communication at USP (University of São Paulo).

“I received memes with my ex-boyfriend beating me, I received rape threats. That’s because I ate breakfast that came to my house”, says influencer Dora Figueiredo.

In 2018, she broke off a relationship with youtuber Otávio Albuquerque, Tavião, and later reported on the networks that she had experienced an abusive relationship with him. Her ex, in turn, was canceled and lost work contracts.

It was understanding the size of these consequences that dancer and teacher Alana de Almeida Cardoso, 30, reviewed her way of acting on social media.

In 2020, she joined the wave of criticism suffered by influencer Gabriela Pugliesi, who organized a party at home at the beginning of the pandemic. “I was outraged, I posted memes with her name. And then I thought: ‘Did we not contribute to an unbalanced penalty? How many people do we know who were doing the same thing? Do these people deserve to lose their jobs and die?” , it says.

Dora Figueiredo saw the cheese bread episode as the end of her participation in the hate cycle. “I also did that finger-pointing thing. Everyone’s already crossed the line. Anyone who wasn’t canceled doesn’t understand the horror. We have things to discuss, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to stone the person ourselves.” The exception for her are cases of violence against women.

For Karhawi, from USP, the long process of erosion of trust in institutions such as family, politics and government drives cancellations. According to the researcher, it has been increasingly difficult to think of collective solutions to structural issues in society. What remains is the individual and selective responsibility for the cancellation.

“The joker is canceled and we don’t solve the problem, but we have an illusion of a collective solution”, he says.

Psychoanalyst Melissa Bottrel sees even greater difficulties for younger generations. “I see changes in adolescent patients after the pandemic. My reading is that this illusion of being able to live without the other actually happened during this period. Now that person goes out into the world, where he has to be in the classroom with someone with an opinion different and without having to turn off the camera and microphone.”

Clara Becker, from Redes Cordiais, defends “strategic silence” as a reaction to problematic speech on social networks. She cites the so-called Barbra Streisand effect, which happens when someone, when seeking to censor content, ends up attracting more interest to it.

In 2003, the American actress and singer tried to sue a photographer for violating her privacy for taking a photo of her mansion as part of an initiative to denounce coastal erosion in California. The image, until then with four downloads, was accessed by thousands of people after the news about the process.

Another path would be to rethink the business model of social networks, which privilege content capable of generating indignation and engagement, favoring cancellations. “We were organizing ourselves in this self-centered place. We talk a lot about the bubble, but there is something earlier”, says Karhawi.