June 2013 consolidates cell phones as a political weapon – 06/24/2023 – Power

The giant woke up, picked up his cell phone, and politics as we knew it would never be the same again.

The 2013 protests put the finishing touch to an analogous organization of power relations. The so-called June Days served as a test drive for what sociologist Esther Solano calls the digitalization of politics.

They were very different starting and finishing points. A decade ago, a “romantic vision prevailed, as if the internet had opened the field of democratization of communication”. It sounds naive today.

“What we saw later is that this digital privilege also causes harmful events, such as the misuse of performance in politics, empty of content, which gives much more importance to the hyperbole of theatricality than to the debate”, says Solano, who organized in 2018 the collection “Hate as Politics: The Reinvention of Rights in Brazil”.

There is no doubt about who won this one. “In recent years, we have seen that digital politics fundamentally benefit politicians who presented themselves as outsiders and knew how to colonize and catapult this network dynamic.” The extreme right especially, according to the academic.

Much was not clear in 2013 for journalist Bruno Torturra, a pioneer in the use of 4G to capture those times of social upheaval.

He idealized Mídia Ninja, a network that covered the protests in real time, equipped with cell phones and also a supermarket cart equipped with laptops, car batteries, camcorders and internet cables long enough to connect them to nearby businesses, he recalls. .

The social network on the rise was Facebook, and 4G, a novelty that facilitated live broadcasts on platforms that no longer exist. Even before Ninja, Torturra had recorded acts of the left with his PósTV, such as the Churrascão da Gente Diferenciada, which mocked residents horrified by the construction of a subway station in an upscale neighborhood of São Paulo, and the Marcha da Marijuana.

June 2013 arrives, and Torturra sees a battlefield that was initially progressive transform into something else.

“Very strange right-wing people” steal the show, in his words. He reported when a group, in front of the Fiesp building illuminated in green and yellow, sang the National Anthem.

One of the last scenes he broadcast that day: a swastika painted on the ground on Avenida Paulista.

It became clear, over the course of the decade, that one side stood out in this story. Torturra observes a certain self-pity on the left, which feels like it is eating dust in online communication.

“It’s a species more adapted to this ecosystem. Inside the subsoil, the worm does better. You can’t say that Carlos Bolsonaro is a communication genius. He’s a tick, he’s going to prosper.”

Deputy Kim Kataguiri (União Brasil-SP) sees a glass half full when he analyzes this digital Darwinism.

The primacy of social networks and conversation apps over more traditional forms of communication has inserted more agents into the public sphere, and that is good, says the co-founder of MBL (Movimento Brasil Livre), one of the main groups on the right that have emerged from the streets in recent years. years.

“The debate has become less elitist. Before, it was restricted to those who followed the press, and poor people did not follow it, did not subscribe to the newspaper. From 2013 onwards, they began to have more access, to participate.”

Kataguiri was in high school ten years ago, watching the turmoil in the cities on the internet. The following year, he helped create the MBL.

“The old politics, I’m sorry, but transparency is fundamental”, said in 2016 the campaign piece by Fernando Holiday, then a member of the movement, who was running for councilor in São Paulo. Copy of propaganda produced by protesters in Spain.

In the same year, Dilma Rousseff (PT) was impeached, targeted by massive protests that had the MBL and figures such as today deputy Carla Zambelli (PL-SP), a first-time Bolsonarist at the forefront.

Another breaking point, according to anthropologist Isabela Kalil, coordinator of the Extreme Right Observatory, was the popularization of WhatsApp in Brazil from 2014 onwards. Plots later accommodated under the umbrella of Bolsonarism were agile in using pre-existing channels, from religious to car washes.

If they start on the left, see the digitized victory of Barack Obama in the US in 2008, technological tools are appropriated by the other pole and begin to spread disinformation, according to Kalil. Hence the flood of fake news, not restricted to the extreme right, but certainly dominated by it.

Another thing that catches your attention: “In 2013, we see the first manifestations of support for military intervention, symptomatic of a turn that will happen.”

“We left Facebook”, said a noisy catchphrase from that wave of protests, recalls Ronaldo Lemos, chief scientist at the Technology and Society Institute of Rio de Janeiro and columnist for Sheet.

The jokingly dubbed “couch activists” now took to the streets. With multiple leaders and a horizontal structure, they resembled the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, movements that were still optimistic about a future that, little did they know, reserved for them a dictatorial retreat in the Middle East and the rise of Donald Trump in the USA.

The ideal of democratized communication did not take long to melt into thin air. “Networks prioritize content with great emotional impact and that stirs fear”, says Lemos.

“It is no longer people who decide what to look at or follow. The algorithm started to decide what was distributed or not: short messages, slogans, long texts were not privileged. And we know what happened.”

The election of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) in 2018 took place, subsidized in part by the digital prowess of a new right that had nothing to do with traditional parties such as the PSDB or the DEM (now merged into the União Brasil).

More familiar with this language of the networks, she reigned supreme for years in the middle and continues to produce symbolic scenes, such as the lives broadcast by the authors of the riot on January 8.

The symbiosis between politics and the internet went beyond ideological boundaries, and today the progressive field runs against the prejudice.

An example was the post in which the little lion asks “what’s up, all jewelry?” in the official account of the Federal Revenue, about to start the Income Tax declarations. The same question was being asked on the networks for Bolsonaro, a joke with the scandal of Saudi gifts for his wife.

“The left is learning”, acknowledges Kataguiri. “It’s losing, but before it didn’t even lose because it didn’t participate in the competition.”

But the rival pole still prevails, which is clear in a survey by Bites Consultoria, specialized in the digital universe. In 2017, then deputy Bolsonaro had 6.7 million followers on the networks. Now a former president, he has more than 62 million.

The virtual scrutiny is vast. The 513 deputies and 81 senators of the current legislature are followed, together, by 386 million profiles – a person can follow several accounts, and there are even those who maintain more than one, it is worth remembering.

Kataguiri is still enthusiastic about this new way of doing politics, but he is not ignoring harmful side effects, such as confirmation bias.

It is about the predisposition of all of us to buy a speech that is already aligned with personal convictions. “It’s a tendency that the brain has to leverage our beliefs, and the algorithm knows that.”

For Torturra, from Mídia Ninja, 2013 is “much more like the end of one thing than the beginning of another”. He rescues a sentence he published after returning from an act in 2013 that, for him, already smelled bad: “The giant woke up. And he has a strong breath”.