Content uploaded by Julien Figeac
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Julien Figeac on Oct 05, 2021
Content may be subject to copyright.
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 261 -
Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook:
the role of cultural events in political participation
Julien Figeac
Nathalie Paton
Angelina Peralva
Arthur Coelho Bezerra
Guillaume Cabanac
Héloïse Prévost
Pierre Ratinaud
Tristan Salord
Abstract
This research explores how Brazilian activist groups participate in
Facebook to coordinate their social struggles, based on a lexical
analysis of publications on 529 pages, published between 2013 and
2017. These groups set up two main repertoires of action by mobilizing
Facebook as an arena for challenging political action and a tool for
coordinating their mobilizations. This research shows more specifically
that artistic expression and the agenda of cultural events are central to
these digital action repositories. Publications and conversations
related to culture punctuate the ordinary exchange of information
between activists, especially during the lulls of social struggles. They
structure activist networks on a medium-term basis and contribute to
the coordination of social movements by creating the conditions for
occasional gatherings, transversal to different types of activism and to
various social struggles.
Resumo
Esta pesquisa explora como grupos ativistas brasileiros participam do
Facebook para coordenar suas lutas sociais, a partir de uma análise
lexical de publicações em 529 páginas, publicadas entre 2013 e 2017.
Esses grupos configuram dois repertórios principais de ação ao
mobilizar o Facebook como uma arena para desafiar ações políticas e
como um instrumento de coordenação de suas mobilizações. Mais
especificamente, a pesquisa mostra que a expressão artística e a
agenda de eventos culturais são centrais para esses repositórios de
ação digital. Publicações e conversas relacionadas à cultura pontuam
a troca comum de informações entre ativistas, especialmente durante
os períodos de menor mobilização no âmbito do ativismo. Eles
estruturam redes de ativistas a médio prazo e contribuem para a
coordenação dos movimentos sociais, criando as condições para
encontros pontuais, transversais aos diferentes tipos de ativismo e para
as várias lutas sociais.
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 262 -
How do the Internet and social media renew modes of civic engagement and the
manners in which political participation is expressed by ordinary citizens? In the field of
Internet Studies, this question fuels controversy as access to this technology, and the
numerous innovations that exploit its resources, are progressively democratized. Those who
uphold the so-called “revolution” theory emphasize how this technology has been able to
revitalize liberal democracies (Shane, 2004) by supporting citizens to experiment with more
horizontal modes of social organization (Castells, 2012). From this perspective, the use of
social media seems to have a real effect on behavior, encouraging political commitment
(Boulianne, 2015; Skoric et al. 2016; Koc-Michalska, Lilleker and Vedel, 2016). During the
Arab Springs, for example, social media formed a new resource for collective action by
allowing activists to share information, create a network between protestors and
communicate with foreign media outlets (Eltantawy and Wiest, 2011). These studies
highlight the positive effects of the Internet and social media on democracy. Other areas of
research show that, on the contrary, the Internet generates a perverse effect by reducing the
political horizons of individuals. Some scholars highlight how social media has changed the
global economy by developing a “platform capitalism” (Srnieck, 2017). By leading citizens
to share personal content and private data, these platforms also allow Silicon Valley
companies to extract and analyze data pertaining to the behaviors and opinions of their
users on a large scale. They tend to favor a “capitalism of surveillance” that challenges
democratic norms (Zuboff, 2015) and demonstrates how ICT is not a tool of democratization
designed to revitalize liberal democracies.
Yet, no matter which side of the controversy is considered, whether researchers
showcase the positive effects of social media on democracy or insist on the limitations of
platform capitalism, it is difficult to argue with the fact that social media has changed the
way politics is being conducted today. Furthermore, internet studies that capture political
participation tend to focus on a limited time in space, when social uproar is at its strongest,
thus capturing a very specific type of social reality. The observation of political participation
is rarely taken into account in a longitudinal perspective, missing out on how online
engagement is nursed on a day-to-day basis and supported through more mundane media
activities by a core group of supporters. Without disregarding periods of social struggle, it
is important to offer longitudinal perspectives to better apprehend how matters unfold far
from the spotlights of news events and strong social protest.
This study offers to address this issue by enquiring the role of social media in the
context of Brazil, a democracy recently marked by political agitation. For the past dozen
years, there has been a surge in social conflict: protests to denounce the impact of building
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 263 -
hydroelectric dams on native indigenous lands as well as the negative effects on the
environment; violence linked to gender; strikes to protest teachers’ low pay; an uproar
against the costs of the FIFA World Cup; national marches against corruption;
demonstrations related to the destitution of the former Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff
(Telles, 2017). In this tidal wave of civil unrest, June 2013 constitutes a turning point: a large-
scale protest erupted on the back of a series of demonstrations that took place over the
preceding years (Solano et al., 2014). These protests had largely gone unnoticed, benefiting
from little visibility, even though some of the struggles had been co-opted by the successive
PT governments (Partido dos Trabalhadores; the Workers’ Party). Major stakeholders and the
Brazilian welfare state alike were then invited to co-produce social policies (Leite Lopes et
Heredia, 2014). But suddenly, in June 2013, a wave of major protests emerged on the far left-
wing of the PT, making previous co-operations obsolete (Peralva et al., 2017). In the months
and years that followed, major right-wing protests hit the streets and progressively led to
the destitution of Dilma Rousseff, who had been re-elected in 2014.
While this series of mobilizations can be framed as social unrest, they are also an
indicator of citizens’ will to contribute to policy and can thus be understood as a sign of
vitality for citizen participation. As such, the Brazilian political scene represents an ideal
setting to observe changes in digital participation in the context of a democratic regime.
More importantly, this continuum in social protest over the years establishes a singular
political context through which to the study digital democracy with a longitudinal
perspective, even more so now that social media has come to play an important role in the
organization and coordination of citizens’ demonstrations (Cardoso, Lapa and Di Fatima,
2016). Reflecting observations conducted over the course of several years, this article intends
to seize the opportunity to dive into the ups and downs of political engagement, from times
where the agenda is saturated, to times where there is little to no reason to gather or
communicate given the lack of a political agenda.
To be exact, we shall see how Brazilian activist networks have used Facebook since
the milestone year of 2013. We have decided to focus on media activists who label
themselves as left-wing or assimilate to this affiliation. Given that the initial spark in the
social conflicts of 2013 were primarily labelled as left-wing at the time of their occurence,
and as such, placed main changes within the spectrum of this political obedience, we
followed these types of people and groups. History would later show us the importance of
the rise of the right-wing, but studying a network of left-wing activist groups in the context
of political turmoil in Brazil will nonetheless allow us to capture the renewal of media
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 264 -
practices and online political citizen participation, given their initial upsurges, and later
pushback to the increase of far right.
The evolution of media participation will be investigated by means of a lexical
analysis of publications on 529 Facebook pages, published between 2013 and 2017. This
material allows us to explore how Brazilian left-wing groups participate in this platform to
take a stand in public debates, push their political agendas, voice their opposition to
government policies or coordinate their actions. It will help showcase the ways in which a
wide social network of left-wing activists turn to Facebook over the span of several years to
fuel opposition in the public debate, build counter-hegemonic positions to face opponents
in public debates and exchange to organize mobilization in the streets, all the while, using
this same platform to inwardly generate digital sociability and ensure the longevity of the
group over time with simple social events and gatherings.
The presentation of the results of this study is divided into two sections. The first part
presents an analysis of the main topics of discussion used by militant groups. We show how
citizens appropriate Facebook over a long period of time, thus highlighting how
participation provides means to organize collective actions and supports the exchange of
information and ideas. In this section, we shall study the main digital repertoires of action
mobilized by activist groups to engage in democracy. Two repertoires will be presented,
one pertaining to challenging the government’s political action, one providing support to
the coordination of militant action on the ground. The second section will further analyze
the action repertoire pertaining to the coordination of mobilizations. This part shows that,
while the online coordination of mobilization can target the organization of protests in the
street or other vindictive actions, it also encaptures the organization of cultural and artistic
events. These cultural events, whether media (music, films, photographs, etc.) or artistic
(Carnaval, concerts, exhibitionss, film screenings, etc.), represent a means of action for
Brazilian activist networks to uphold their social ties. The article then goes on to
demonstrate how the publication of these types of events structures networks and upholds
sociability over the years, by stimulating participation between periods of time when social
struggles occur, encouraging offline encounters and a sense of togetherness, knowing that
these long-term social relations, fuel media participation just as much as they allow social
movements to resist the test of time.
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 265 -
Observation of actions of repertoire through a lexical analysis of study media
engagement
Several studies have shown how digital resources and social media websites have
diversified activists’ modes of action by allowing grassroot organizations, or random
citizens for instance, to take action or coordinate protests more efficiently (Castells, 2012;
Earl and Kimport, 2011). Where mobilizations were traditionally conducted by institutions
- such as unions or political parties - governed by formal and hierarchical rules of procedure,
digital tools have renewed collective action rationales by providing means to take political
action into one’s own hands (Norris, 2002). To better explain this bottom-up development
in political engagement, Chadwick suggests using Tilly’s notion of “action repertoire”
(Tilly, 2013) but extends on it and renames it in order to include the transformations of the
media landscape. He speaks of “digital network repertoires” (Chadwick, 2007).
The notion of actions of repertoire initially referred to routines and practices
conveyed amongst activists; for example, learning to organize public marches and petitions,
holding official meetings, using sitting-ins in sign of protest are actions of repertoire (Tilly,
2013). Digital network repertoires encompass this initial understanding but broaden the
scope by insisting on the politicized uses of social media; for example, the publication of
politically-oriented tweets or the filming of police violence with a Smartphone can be
considered as “digital network repertoires”. This latter notion also insists on the fact that
nowadays, civic action is increasingly convergent, combining online and offline activities,
and supposes distributed trust across horizontally linked citizens, given that citizens favor
collective discussions through horizontal and decentralized networks over claims from a
single authoritative information source (Chadwick, 2007:285). We shall use the notion of
digital network repertoire to illustrate how the Internet and social media can diversify
collective action by allowing, for example, individuals to easily share their points of view
and to chat in decentralized forums (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013).
One of the main repertoires of action online is the use of the Internet to express
discontent and share personal opinions. Studies of the lexical content of tweets published
on Twitter during the Movement of the Indignant in Spain and Greece, followed by the Occupy
Wall Street movement in the United States, show that the internet was primarily used for
protest purposes by local supporters (Theocharis et al., 2015). Several repertoires were
spotted, such as using Twitter for political communication, motivating people to take action,
and organizing the actual series of actions of the social movements on the ground. Yet, the
study underlines the fact that the conversational and expressive functions of the web
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 266 -
dominate all the other modes of actions. Accessing the public debate via the web indeed
allows one to take part in a forum for discussion amongst citizens at an unprecedented scale.
Pursuing the appropriation rationales of these big tech media platforms by
distinguishing the action repertoires used by political activists is essential to identifying the
extent to which social media enhances the coordination of social movements or whether
they simply play a role in the exchange of ideas and information (Theocharis et al., 2015).
We shall extend this research perspective by analyzing the messages published by Brazilian
left-wing digital networks of activists on their Facebook pages in order to identify the types
of repertoires mobilized and to determine the extent to which these messages represent
simple conversations or whether they consist rather in a call for demonstration and protest.
To do so, we will consider the place occupied by conversation, information exchange, the
organization of events, coordination between users or calls for action. As we move forward,
this article will touch upon the singularity of the Brazilian “civic culture” (Dahlgren, 2009)
and illustrate how digital contributions renew the forms of civic engagement in this lively
and collective culture of protest and demonstration, especially since the events of 2013.
The study of repertoires of action has been previously conducted on the basis of the
analysis of online conversations, as is the case with the article from Theocharis mentioned
above. There may be different manners to investigate repertoires of actions, but we resort to
lexical analysis as well. This approach can provide an understanding of users’ intentions
and modes of action.
Method: Presentation of the corpus and description of the approach
To identify the corpus to study, we carried out 18 interviews in the Spring of 2017,
with activists highly involved in the social protests of 2013, implicated in the coordination
of their social and political organizations. The organizations were mainly located in São
Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. During the interviews with these left-wing activists, we asked
interviewees to recount the innovative ways in which their organization used internet
services and the roles that social media played in their political engagement. We also asked
them to retrace the past years to portray the Brazilian political scene on a larger scale and
provide a portrait of the main political events in which they took part. Although
interviewees evoked very different action repertoires in relation to their media uses, yet they
all strongly insisted on the centrality of Facebook in their daily political practices. They used
Facebook as a portal to the world to encounter others and interact at the scale of the world
wide web; they used the platform as a window to showcase their social and political
activities as well as promote their projects and overall goals. They also noted that the events
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 267 -
of 2013 formed a landmark year in the structuration of social movements in Brazil in which
Facebook was presented as a major player in the political engagement at that time as well
as within the following years (Peralva et al., 2017). These interviews invited us to study the
uses of Facebook in-depth and thus better understand how Facebook was being used by
Brazilian activists to fuel their debates, exchange information, coordinate action, or simply
converse.
This orientation is more relevant considering that Facebook is a central platform to
the Brazilian media landscape. This can be confirmed by the polls below. As Figure 1 shows,
this social media website is by far the most used in Brazil, especially for those engaged in
social movements and political struggles, since 2017 and the following years.
Figure 1. Facebook in the Brazilian social media landscape
1
If these reasons alone do not suffice to justify studying new forms of political
participation on Facebook, it could also be stated that academic work mostly targets how
Twitter is used. This micro-blogging platform favors, however, very specific types of
repertoires of action due to the briefness of messages published there (280 characters
1
Data taken from StatCounter Global Stats, cf. http://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/brazil/#monthly-201301-
201904
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 268 -
maximum). Moreover, there is still a lack of evidence regarding the ways in which activist
groups participate in online arenas throughout time, over the course of several years.
To better identify how left-wing Brazilian activists were using Facebook to political
ends in relation to specific repertoires of action and political events, we decided to collect
the data from the pages of the organizations we interviewed. By using the Netvizz software
(Reider, 2013), data was collected from January 2013 - year that the interviewees mention as
central - to December 2017 - date at which the study was launched.
During the interviews conducted in the Spring of 2017, we also requested that the
interviewees cite the names of the organizations and/or groups they considered the most
important activist movements. We suggested they list those whose convictions they shared
and who played an important role in their political realm. At this stage, we were able to
identify a network of 101 activist groups whose political engagement overlapped. On the
basis of this sample of 101 groups, we next moved onto Facebook and identified a network
of Facebook pages that were the most “liked” by the whole sample, i.e. those interviewed
and those mentioned by interviewees. We integrated into our corpus any Facebook page
that had received reciprocal likes and were liked by at least 5 groups of the sample; in other
words, at least 5 of 101 groups from the original sample liked a page and this page liked
back at least 5 of the 101 groups. By operating in this manner, we only considered groups
that were well-inserted into an overall network of activism. This left us with a total sample
of 529 Facebook pages of Brazilian activist groups. If the political obedience of pages was
not a criterion for selection, nonetheless, all the pages selected were labelled by users
themselves as having left-wing tendencies.
Provided the perimeter of this corpus, we believe we can develop a representative
analysis of the messages published by Brazilian militant networks, and thus highlight the
dominant repertoires of action carried out in the digital arena from 2013 to 2017, as well as
illustrate the role of these forms of participation for the participants themselves.
Different domains of action in the field of political practices and citizen participation
To properly consider the type of activism under study in this article, we broke down
the field of political practices into different domains of action. By means of how pages
labelled their own practices, several kinds of political practices were identified amongst the
529 Facebook pages selected to compose the sample. As Figure 2 shows, Facebook mainly
harbors “political” activist groups. We will distinguish them from other tendencies, such as
urban activists or feminist activists that, while overlapping, represent niches of engagement,
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 269 -
given that these latter groups develop more targeted and specific actions centered around a
“cause” of sorts instead of commenting largely on political matters of all sorts.
Figure 2. Proportion and volume of activity of pages based on
the different types of political groups within the corpus
To be precise, our corpus regroups eight types of organizations:
- political activism embracing the full scale of public debates, tackling or embracing major
ideological paradigms (such as capitalism, anarchism, and so on), dipping into general
politics, without a pre-distinct favoring for a given “cause” as almost all of the other domains
here below do;
- cultural activism, also understood as “artivism”, related to cultural events or artistic activities
of different sorts;
- collectives federated around urban issues, such as urban planning, the cost of public
transportation, etc.;
- media activists who produce alternative news and conduct citizen journalism online;
- organizations structured around advocacy for favelas’ representation in public debates and
progress for the people from those neighborhoods;
- stakeholders structured around ecological and environmental causes and movements;
- feminist groups fighting for the recognition of women’s rights and equality;
- NGOs as recognised political stakeholders but also professional practitioners.
Figure 2 also shows the range of different uses of Facebook carried out by the sample
as well as the proportions in which each type of use appears in the database, depending on
whether:
- the publications are published by Facebook page administrators (n = 847,728);
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 270 -
- the publications are shared by users, whether the administrators of the page or mere
followers who share content on the page (n = 123,135,375);
- the publications are comments on a post published by users, i.e. administrators and random
users alike (n = 13,722,657).
Focusing on lexical content generated by administrators to identify repertoires of action
Publications shared by the administrators can entail sharing a picture, a video (of a
gathering, speech, etc.), or an article published by an external source (online press website,
an activist website, an NGO, a public institution, etc.). As picture 1 below illustrates,
administrators write introductions to these types of contents. These captions are meant to
lead visitors to consult the publication further. They provide contextual elements to
facilitate the understanding of a picture, a video or a press article.
Picture 1. Example of a message posted on a Facebook page, including a timestamp, a text, a
hyperlink, key words (hashtags), a video, as well as the number of positive opinions ( likes) and
shared contents.
In this article, we shall limit our analysis to the lexical content of publications made
by the activist group administrators. Since they cover a wide range of subjects, we did a
computer-assisted analysis with IRaMuTeQ
2
software to statistically identify the most
common discourse categories and the diverse lexical realms. We explain this below.
2
Cf. http://www.iramuteq.org/
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 271 -
Going back to figure 2, we can see that the pages from “political” organizations, just
as the number of their publications, are over-represented in our corpus. However, the use
of IRaMuTeQ will allow us to eliminate the differences in volume without impacting the
quality of our analyses. To be more precise, lexical analysis via IRaMuTeQ does not simply
showcase what is discussed most but offers an overview of the variety of topics in respect
to the volume of conversations.
Method of analysis of the lexical content
The collected content of publications shared between 2013 and 2017 by Brazilian
activist groups on their Facebook pages is analyzed using the open-source software,
IRaMuTeQ; this software allows us to identify the main themes of a corpus (Smyrnaios and
Ratinaud, 2017). It is based on a hierarchical top-down classification that can be described
as a succession of bi-partitions based on a factorial analysis of correspondences.
The first step in this analysis is to clean up the corpus by completing a preliminary
lexical treatment: the textual content is lemmatized to reduce the lexical variability. The
classification process consists in cutting lines of this matrix in half to make a cluster of the
publications that tend to contain the same words. This stage entails a factorial analysis of
correspondences, the first factor of which is used to determine groups of publications that
maximize the internal homogeneity of the groups and the heterogeneity of the two different
groups. Once all the lexical categories are obtained, the researcher can proceed to the
analysis of the cluster, by describing the theme at hand according to the vocabulary that
characterizes it. This lexical cluster is composed of words that are significantly over-
represented in the category when compared to the whole set of other categories (based on a
Chi2). The “lexical worlds” which emerge present the various themes addressed in the
corpus.
The analysis that we are going to present now will detail the contents of these
different thematic categories in order to account for the main themes of debate that
punctuated exchanges.
Findings from the lexical analysis
The 529 Facebook pages of the activist groups in our corpus display a significant
number of messages (n = 847,728) published over the course of four years. Administrators
generated about 450,29 daily messages, i.e. about 0.85 publications per day and per page.
Some of them do not publish posts every day. During school holidays, for example, we can
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 272 -
note a decrease in activity (cf. Figure 3). That being said, the volume of publication is fairly
constant, especially from the end of 2013 to the end of the study.
Figure 3. Number of daily publications on the Facebook pages
Despite the fact that Facebook page administrators have published the same number
of daily publications between 2013 and 2017 (0.85 per day; cf. Figure 2), there are more and
more comments over time. In 2013, the users of these 529 pages published between 1,000
and 3,000 comments per day, while at the end of 2017 this number had risen to ranges
between 13,000 and 80,000 daily comments. The volume of comments published by visitors
indeed appears to significantly increase over the years studied, particularly between 2016
and 2017 (cf. Figure 4). It thus appears that this content has led an ever-increasing number
of users to react, fuelling even larger collective conversations year after year. It thus appears
that Facebook has established itself over the years in Brazil as a source of information and a
space for political participation for left-wing supporters.
Figure 4. Number of daily comments on the Facebook pages
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 273 -
Methodological orientations, main themes and presentation of the two key repertoires of
action
To better grasp how the activists’ groups use the social media platform and develop
specific repertoires of action, we will now consider the computer-assisted analysis via
IRaMuTeQ software, and thus statistically identify the most common topics, broached by
administrators of these pages, likely to indicate patterns of use.
The results are presented below in a dendrogram that segments the online
conversations into classes of discourse, underlining the main themes of conversation of the
corpus (cf. Figure 5). It also provides information on the size of each class of speech (i.e.
percentages and size of the boxes above the branches of words) and the over-represented
lexicon in each class of speech (i.e. the more a word is situated at the top of a branch, the
more it is over-represented in a cluster).
We selected a classification of 19 themes to generate the dendrogram that appears
below. These 19 categories are separated into two parts (cf. Figure 5). This segmentation into
two parts, done by the IRaMuTeQ software, is essential because it isolates the two main
lexical worlds based on which we will be pursuing our analysis. In the following pages, we
will indeed see that each one of these two segments represents a repertoire of action.
From the top part of the graph to the better half of it, the first part of the arborescence
of the dendrogram distinguishes categories C8 to C19. This first segment regroups most of
the corpus (62.7%). Provided the centrality of lexicons relating to protests against
governmental action (cf. Part 1.1), these categories materialize a way in which activists use
Facebook, i.e. Facebook is apprehended as a media arena by means of which people protest.
The second part of the dendrogram, from the middle of the graph to the final cluster
(cf. Figure 5), then constitutes the second segment, regrouping categories C1 to C7. This
second section represents 37.3% of the corpus. These categories reveal the role of Facebook as
a repository to coordinate protest and organize militant activities (cf. Part 1.2).
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 274 -
Figure 5. Dendrogram ranking the 19 categories identified by the lexical analysis
First repertoire of action: the appropriation of Facebook as a media arena in which to protest
If we zoom in on the first repertoire of action and only analyze the related lexical
clusters, we can note that the first part of the dendrogram regroups various subjects and
social issues around which these groups organize their combat (cf. categories C8 to C19 in
Figure 6).
Figure 6. Vocabulary used in the contributors’ messages to engage in
political debate and oppose government action (n = 847,728 messages)
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 275 -
The first subdivision of these categories (C8 to C12) represents a significant part of
the lexical content (27.3%), composing more than a quarter of the discussions on Facebook.
It is essentially characterized by themes related to violence. What stands out first is
intersectional, interpersonal and structural violence, as well as violence against women,
LGBTQIA+
3
communities and different races (C10). Secondly there are two categories
related to denunciations of various sorts of State violence perpetrated by officers of law
enforcement during gatherings and street demonstrations (C11) and others, more deadly,
that are part of the Brazilians’ daily life. (C12).
Parallel to these categories that dominate and give the overall thematic tint to this
lexical sub-category, we find a vocabulary formed by general political terms (C9):
revolution, capitalism, fascism, anarchism, etc. These terms appear frequently in the
messages published by the administrators of these Facebook pages. It is interesting to note
that this category is linked to category 8 which regroups words related to emotions, to
activists’ experiences and their private lives. (C8). In other words, classical political terms
(C9) and those relating to emotions and one’s private life (C8) remain linked and are
important in the way in which these groups define the object of their commitment and
combat.
The second subdivision of these categories (C13 to C19) refers to the different issues
at stake around which social movements in Brazil have revolved these past years. We find
protest vocabulary relating to the Indigenous population and Quilombola community
struggles (C13), as well as issues related to water management and “agro-hydro-business”
(C14), which have become quite important in São Paulo. One category regroups terms
linked to justice, human rights, and criminal law (C15). These terms also matter for
contestation and are linked to those in category 16 where words such as ‘democratic’, for
example, can be seen in the dendrogram. These two categories are equally tied to social
themes (education, salary, health) (C17) and to category 18 that regroups the words
concerning the long struggle around urban transportation that mobilized certain
communities for several years. Category 19, to which the former refers, regroups words
pertaining to a representative political system (deputy, president), the names of the leading
actors as well as those related to the crisis that struck the system (i.e. the criminal
investigation that revealed cases of corruption and the destitution process aimed at the
President of the Brazilian Republic).
3
The acronym LGBTQIA+ designates the following communities: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex and
Asexual and the sign + refers to other genders and sexualities.
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 276 -
These two subdivisions of the lexical analysis highlight the way in which activists
have appropriated Facebook as an arena of public protest and means for denunciation of
governmental action. The impact of these lexical contents (C8 to C19) in the total corpus is
highly significant (62.7%). This shows that this social media platform plays, above all, the
role of a “conversation” and “information exchange” platform among activists, as is the case
of its homologue, the microblogging platform Twitter, used for protesting (Theocharis et al.,
2015).
Second repertoire of action: The appropriation of Facebook as a mobilization tool
The Facebook pages of Brazilian activist groups also contain a huge amount of lexical
content related to the coordination of offline mobilizations. The second half of the lexical
analysis initially inserted in the article above, the one containing 19 classes, is represented
here in a new dendrogram (cf. Figure 7). The figure shows that this register of action
repertoires appears in categories C1 to C7, which regroups 37.3% of the lexical material
analyzed. If we have a closer look at this repertoire of action, we can note two sub-
repertoires.
We shall start with lexical clusters (C5, C6, C7) that refer to the most standard and
general terms used in messages to coordinate demonstrations of different types. These
lexical realms deal with times (C6) and places of gatherings (C7), notably the names of
streets and squares in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The impact of these two categories in
the total corpus (10.2%) shows that the scheduling of times and places to meet and gather
plays an important role in the activists’ messages. These categories go hand in hand with a
third one (C5) that also deals with coordination of mobilization in referring more directly to
youth and modes of action. It contains the names of different collective organizations
(Levante Popular da Juventude, MTST, Mídia Ninja, DCE) often composed of university or high
school students in various cities (Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre). The names of these collective
organizations and places are used in messages announcing the rallies. We find terms
specifying the type of action, for example, with terms like walk, forum or occupy (marcha,
forum, ocupação). Slogans (Fora Temer !) are equally present in this digital network repertoire.
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 277 -
Figure 7. Vocabulary used by the participants in their coordination messages (n = 847,728
messages), focusing on the first half of the dendrogram in Figure 3
Further analysis of the messages online then reveals how this coordination and
mobilization repertoire can be broken down and harbors another repertoire of action. This
new repertoire, to be considered as a subcategory of mobilization, deals with
communication (C1) and the cultural agenda (C2, C3, C4). The messages published by the
Facebook page administrators contain various references to communication tools (email,
telefone, facebook, whatsapp) (C1), thus demonstrating their role in the coordination and
organization of militant activities. It is interesting to note that these terms, related to
communication, are associated with lexical realms inherent to the cultural field (C2, C3, C4).
These categories contain different words that refer to cultural and artistic forms of
expression (filme, cinema, livro, literatura, fotografia) with music, in a category of its own,
clearly over-represented, possibly in relationship to the Carnival and its multiple activities
(fanfares, Carnaval blocks, etc.) (C4). These categories also contain references to institutions,
places, and, more precisely, modes of access to different forms of cultural and artistic
expression (museu, festival, cinema, exposição, galeria, etc.). In other words, the various terms
in the cultural field are used in these Facebook pages as an event, to encourage the Internet
users and audiences of these pages to get “physically” involved, whether as simple
spectators or actual volunteers actively contributing to the organization of the artistic event.
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 278 -
This analysis thus reveals that the diffusion of information about the upcoming
cultural agenda and requests to become involved through artistic or cultural events (C2, C3,
C4) play a key role (18.5%) in the online exchanges. It shows that the coordination of artistic
and cultural events is linked to a highly political repertoire, one that supports activists in
coordinating their mobilizations and demonstrations (C5, C6, C7). Such a finding is
interesting for several reasons; first because this result may reflect the singularity of the
Brazilians’ “civic culture” evoked by Dahlgren (2009) and extend upon this notion on the
media practices front. That being said, we would need to conduct comparative research,
taking into account other countries, to document the originality of Brazilians’ media
participation. In addition to this analytical perspective, this finding is also worth
underlining, given the mix of political and cultural/artistic realms. Facebook allows activists
to expand their social and cultural practices, bringing together on a single platform causes
they support as well as the cultural agenda and related concerts or exhibitions they may
want to attend. Over and above a simple offer, the mix of the two repertoires shows that
political engagement over time is connected to the cultural and artistic agenda. The analysis
of militants’ Facebook pages reveals to what extent concerts and exhibitions breathe life into
organizations and collectives, enhance their everyday life and flame social actors’
participation in future causes or struggles.
Changing levels of mobilization depending on the periods in time and social actors
behind the posts
This next part of the article will zoom in on the mobilization digital network
repertoire that we previously identified (cf. Section 1.2 above). We will further our
understanding of this repertoire by first describing the articulation and evolution of this
repertoire over time, between 2013 and 2017, to detail how Facebook was used by Brazilian
activists over the years. Secondly, we shall evaluate the differences between the various
groups of social actors in our corpus to determine if their use of Facebook, as a coordination
tool, varies according to the “primary object” of their commitment to the cause they defend:
the environment, feminism, living conditions in the favelas, etc.
We will take into account the 19 categories that emerged from the lexical analysis and
visualize how all of these categories have evolved over time. The chronological
representation below (cf. Figure 8) illustrates this evolution; the numbers of the categories
are listed in the grey column on the right.
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 279 -
This figure allows us to better understand how the categories containing a
mobilization repertoire have evolved over time. For reminders, this repertoire corresponds
to classes C1 to C7, with on the one hand, clusters linked to coordination (C5, C6, C7), and
on the other hand, classes linked to the information on and scheduling of cultural events
(C1, C2, C3, C4). The evolution of the repertoire can be visualized in the black curve;
everything below the curve (C1 to C7) corresponds to the mobilization repertoire,
everything above the line (so from C8 to C19) does not pertain to this repertoire. What
appears in the figure below is that the repertoire is strongly represented during the first six
months of 2013, followed by several peaks when Facebook was used more by activist groups
to coordinate their activities, whether they be engagement in cultural events or
demonstrations. In particular, we can pinpoint the over-representation of these categories
in December 2014, November and December 2015, and July to November 2017.
Figure 8. Chronological monthly representation of the impact of the lexical categories C1 to C7
We shall now try to comprehend if the periods of over-representation of these
categories as highlighted by this curve (cf. Figure 8) correspond to times when there were
the most publications and activity on the Facebook pages (cf. Figure 3). To determine if this
is what is at stake and answer the question, Figure 9 represents the monthly evolution rates
of Facebook publication between 2013 and 2017. This rate is positive when the number of
monthly publications is higher than the average over the entire period. Figure 9 compares
this evolution with the monthly evolution rates of classes C1 to C7 - i.e. the volumes of
messages pertaining to the mobilization repertoire per month. What we can see here is
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 280 -
publication rates follow opposite evolutions: when the volume of publication increases, the
volume of the mobilization repertoire decreases and vice versa. In other words, the more
people that converse online and take part in political public debates, the lower the number
of messages relative to demonstrations and cultural events. The more talk there is about the
organization of demonstrations and the upcoming concert or exhibition, the less
conversation there is about politics and specific causes. So, the impact of the vocabulary
related to mobilizations is rather significant during phases when the daily number of
publications on Facebook pages is low. This phenomenon can be observed most of the time,
in 85% of the months between January 2013 and December 2017, except for 7 phases; they
are represented in grey in Figure 9 to highlight the phases where the evolution rates increase
or decrease at the same time.
Figure 9. Comparison between the evolution rate of Facebook publication
volumes and the evolution rate of the lexical classes C1 to C7.
This finding leads us to consider that the phases in which administrators publish the
most content are characterized by a diversification of themes and lexical content in the
corpus, particularly the vocabulary reflecting opposition to governmental action that
appears in categories C8 to C19 of the general analysis. During these phases, the proportion
of the lexical categories in the mobilization repertoire (C1 to C7) is therefore statistically less
significant. This conclusion shows that the phases in which activist group administrators
publish the most amount of content corresponds to moments when the thematic diversity
of exchanges is the greatest. Inversely, the role of Facebook as a mobilization resource is the
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 281 -
least apparent in phases when a larger place needs to be made for discussions relating to
subjects of social struggles.
We also note here the singularity of the cultural agenda repertoire. Like the other
vocabulary in the mobilization repertoire, the lexicons of the cultural agenda are over-
represented during phases in which the number of publications is the lowest. The
promotion of artists or cultural events structures the daily activity on these Facebook pages,
at a regular and constant rhythm according to the cultural events scheduled. When
demonstrations are less prominent, concerts and exhibitions maintain social relations on a
day-to-day basis, by providing activities and manners to get together, outside of the scope
of strong social protest and mobilization in the streets. When mobilizations become more
intense, this typical aspect of the activist culture is occasionally submerged in the
voluminous flow of information related to the current subject in their combat.
Conclusion
The lexical analysis of publications posted online by left-wing Brazilian activist
groups has allowed us to identify the digital network repertoires developed on Facebook by
these groups between 2013 and 2017 (Chadwick, 2007). Facebook is mainly used as a digital
media arena in which contributors can criticize and oppose political representatives’ choices
and actions. In this respect, this article falls in line with what has been demonstrated in
previous studies: it shows that, during social movements and power struggles over social
conflicts, conversation and information-sharing play a central role in the use of Facebook to
protest, similar to the way that Twitter can be appropriated for example (Theocharis et al.,
2015).
Findings further reveal that Facebook harbors two main digital network repertoires.
Firstly, Facebook is apprehended as a media arena by means of which people protest, voice
opinions, push political agendas. This is the dominant political use of the platform with
nearly 63% of the militants resorting to Facebook to carry out such media participations.
Secondly, Facebook is used as a resource for the coordination of demonstrations and
militant activities.
However, the second repertoire is of particular interest to us. It may be less
prominent; it still represents over 37% of uses. This proportion is quite significant and shows
to what extent the way in which Facebook is used differs from the way Twitter is used to
protest (Theocharis et al., 2015). Activists resort to this platform over the long term to
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 282 -
publicize their combats and coordinate their gatherings, whereas Twitter is solely employed
as a communicative device.
Zooming in on the second repertoire, the lexical analysis further highlighted the
importance of artistic and cultural modes of expression. People turn to Facebook to share
an upcoming concert or spread the word about the opening of an exhibition. These types of
messages are less present in peak periods of activity, during phases in which social
movements are making news and the rate of publication is highest. Rather, they are at the
heart of the daily, ordinary routines of these pages. The programming of cultural and artistic
type activities plays a role in structuring the protest uses of Facebook in the long term, by
providing content for the militant page newsfeed and offering spaces to continue gathering
offline when there is less happening in the news to debate and less demonstrations taking
place in the streets. They refer to the place cultural scheduling holds in the structuration of
long-term social movements.
This place that cultural and artistic events have in activists’ practices, highlights the
importance cultural actors occupy in these collective combats. In line with the “civic culture”
Dahlgren hints towards, we can consider that the place of lexicons relating to cultural events
in the Facebook pages of Brazilian activist groups reveals a singular appropriation of the
resources of this platform, linked to the civic culture of the country, even though we would
need to extend on this finding in future research to properly document the particularity of
the Brazilian’s modes of appropriation. In any case, the creation of Facebook events, such as
concerts or exhibitions, means that a large number of Facebook users can be invited to
participate in cultural gatherings that have a political scope. We cannot determine how
many users receive these invitations and actually join cultural events such as
demonstrations. But we can consider that these cultural invitations can, at least sporadically,
incite individuals to adhere to or feel concerned by a particular social struggle and even join
the ranks of those protesting.
The main contribution of this research probably lies here. Facebook not only
functions as an arena in which activist groups, day after day, share information and express
criticism. This research shows that forms of artistic expression and the agenda of cultural
events are central in the online action repertoires developed thanks to social media. The
lexical realms of culture punctuate the normal exchanges of information among activists,
particularly when social combat is less intense. They promote the structuration of activist
networks in the medium-term and thus prolong social movements by creating conditions
for one-time gatherings, transversal to the different types of activism and various struggles.
It would be interesting to know whether this phenomenon can be observed in other
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 283 -
countries in order to comprehend whether these lexical realms related to cultural and artistic
events, are specific to the Brazilian civic culture, as portrayed herein, if the modes of artistic
expression and the agenda of cultural scheduling generally play a major role in structuring
activist networks within social media in the medium term.
References
Boulianne, S. (2015), Social media use and participation: A meta-analysis of current research,
Information, Communication & Society, 18(5), 524–538.
Cardoso, G., Lapa, T., Di Fatima, B. (2016), People are the message? Social mobilization and social
media in Brazil. International Journal of Communication, 10, 22.
Castells, M. (2012), Networks of outrage and hope: Social movements in the Internet Age, Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Chadwick, A. (2007), Digital network repertoires and organizational hybridity, Political
Communication, 24(3), 283-301.
Dahlgren, P. (2009), Media and political engagement: Citizens, communication, and democracy, Cambridge
University Press.
Dahlgren, P, (2013), The political web: Media, participation and alternative democracy. Springer.
Earl J. & Kimport K. (2011), Digitally enabled social change: Activism in the Internet age, Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Eltantawy, N., Wiest, J. B. (2011), The Arab spring| Social media in the Egyptian revolution:
reconsidering resource mobilization theory, International journal of communication, 5, 18.
Koc-Michalska, K, Lilleker, D.G., Vedel, T. (2016), Civic political engagement and social change in the new
digital age, New Media Society, 18(9) p. 1807-1816.
Lopes J. S. L., Heredia B. M. A. D., Movimentos Sociais e Esfera Pública: O Mundo da Participação, Rio
de Janeiro : Colégio Brasileiro de Altos Estudos, Forum Brasileiro de Ciência e Cultura, Secretaria
Geral da Presidência da República, 2014.
Meraz, S., Papacharissi, Z. (2013), Networked gatekeeping and networked framing on# Egypt, The
international journal of press/politics, 18(2), 138-166.
Norris, P. (2002), Democratic phoenix: Reinventing political activism, Cambridge University Press.
Papacharissi, Z.A. (2010), A Private Sphere: Democracy in a digital age, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Peralva A., Figeac J. & Paton N. (2017). Resta algo de 2013? Liinc, revista do Laboratório Interdisciplinar
em Informaçao e Conhecimento, 132, p. 381- 400.
Rieder, B. (2013), Studying Facebook via data extraction: the Netvizz application, In Proceedings of
the 5th annual ACM web science conference, p. 346-355, ACM.
Shane, P. M. (2004), Democracy online: the prospects for political renewal through the Internet. Routledge.
Skoric, M. M., Zhu, Q., Goh, D., Pang, N. (2016), Social media and citizen engagement: A meta-
Figeac, Julien et al. Brazilian left-wing activists on Facebook: the role of cultural events in political participation
RASILIANA:
Journal for Brazilian Studies
. ISSN 2245-4373. Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021).
- 284 -
analytic review, New Media & Society, 18(9), 1817–1839.
Smyrnaios, N., Ratinaud, P. (2017), The Charlie Hebdo attacks on Twitter: A comparative analysis of
a political controversy in English and French. Social Media+ Society, 3(1), 2056305117693647.
Solano, E., Manso, B. P., Novaes, W. (2014), Mascarados. A Verdadeira História dos Adeptos da Tática
Black Bloc, São Paulo: Geração Editorial.
Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. John Wiley & Sons.
Tilly, C. (1993), Contentious repertoires in Great Britain, 1758–1834. Social Science History, 17(2), 253-
280.
Telles M., « Corrupção, Legitimidade Democrática e Protestos: O Boom da Direita na Política
Nacional? », Interesse Nacional, ano 8, n°30, 2017.
Theocharis, Y., Lowe, W., Van Deth, J. W., García-Albacete G. (2015), Using Twitter to mobilize
protest action: online mobilization patterns and action repertoires in the Occupy Wall Street,
Indignados, and Aganaktismenoi movements, Information, Communication Society, 18(2), 202-220.
Tufekci, Z. (2017), Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest, Yale University Press.
Zuboff, S. (2015). Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information
civilization. Journal of information technology, 30(1), 75-89.
