New information paths: Mediation and visibility on the Brazilian 2013 protests

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Nina
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista FAMECOS: Mídia cultura e tecnologia
• Texto Completo: https://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/revistafamecos/article/view/40365
• topic: Social media; Protest; Visibility; Mediation; Democracy; Medios sociales; Protesta; Visibilidad; Mediación; Democracia; Mídias sociais; Protesto; Visibilidade; Mediação; Democracia

The Brazilian protests of 2013 were not only a landmark in the country’s political life, but also outlined an important shift in the production, dissemination, and consumption of political information. What we propose in this text is to approach these changes in two senses: to understand the role of the new mediation processes and to discuss who is really gaining visibility in this new communication environment. We understand that, if on the one hand social media open space for the emergence of new information mediators, on the other hand there is an extremely strong visibility inequality among them. What interests us is to understand what are the differences a) in the mediation process and b) in the visibility dynamics in this new media environment in relation to the broadcast model. Our analysis is based on a corpus of 97,000 tweets collected around one of the main hashtags used during the protests. Our results point to a more complex but less visible mediation process. In terms of visibility dynamics, the patterns we found in the conversation about the 2013 protests show that the broadcast model is not reproduced, but the size of the audience continues to influence access to the visibility arena. In both cases, the main difference is related to the role that sociability plays in determining the paths through which information may or may not pass.