Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Prefácio

This research presents methodological alternatives for empirical studies aiming at the incorporation of the memetic perspective to the epistemological repertoire of Information Science. Starting from a proposal of analysis of fictions created within the informational flow of posts in two political groups on Twitter – Mídia Ninja and Movimento Brasil Livre – referring to the opening of the impeachment against President Dilma Rousseff. It is intended to carry out the identification and analysis of the minor units (pieces) of information from the base of this flow capable of being replicated (Richard Dawkins’ “memes”) to assess the mutations they have suffered from the president’s reelection to her impeachment Trial. Since this action would only be possible through the gathering of material that allowed the analysis not only of the content, but also of the context of the analyzed data, the extraction of these “social data” took place through the use of an Application Programming Interface (API), presented by Twitter in 2020. Access for data consumption was carried out with the development of scripts implemented in the Python programming language, following guidelines from the Tweepy Documentation library. It is proposed that the use of these methodological strategies allows the production of a graphic hypothesis of the genealogical relationships capable of expressing the ancestor-descendant sequences among the information in this flow. If successful, this analysis will make it possible to advance the concept of memes as minimal units of information and as an auxiliary element in understanding the organization and propagation of information in the social environment

Disinformation, false information, post-truth phenomenon, scientific denialism, use of the term fake news, and algorithm enhancement are some characteristics of contemporary society. A contextualization is presented in the theoretical foundation about misinformation and algorithms, which are two themes that guide the study. Given this critical information scenario, it becomes necessary to propose and research measures to combat misinformation, mainly because false information can influence users' decision making. The overall objective of the research is to analyze the different approaches to the use of algorithms and technology as a solution to misinformation that appear in scientific articles indexed in the Web of Science (WoS). The study is exploratory; literature search, with a quantitative and qualitative approach, using content analysis. It was adopted to retrieve documents between the years 1945 and 2019. The results indicate that there are 66 articles with solutions that use technology or algorithms to address the problem. The proposals that had the highest incidence were algorithms, Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain, and technological solutions. As for productivity, it was in 2017 that more articles containing solutions were observed, more than half of them in English and belonging to three WoS research areas, Computer Science, Engineering, and Information Science & Library Science. Information Science (IC) focuses on the study of the properties of information, therefore being an interdisciplinary science, addressing misinformation, proposing solutions is necessary for the advancement and progress of the area

To what extent does the way in which digital platforms are organized favor citizen participation? This article looks at this question using a comparative study between two digital informative architectures: the Five Star Movement’s (originally in Italian “Movimento 5 Stelle”) Rousseau platform in Italy, and the Decidim platform, developed after the 15M movement in Spain by a collaboration of entities from different countries. From a qualitative analysis of its architectures – in accordance with an approach based mainly on communication theory – we sought to investigate and describe the ways in which information circulates and operates, and the possibilities they offer for democratic actions. This was accomplished by analyzing two aspects of the platform: 1) the conception and development of codes; 2) the functions that the platform offers and its interaction with users. In this paper, we start from the central hypothesis that the communication conditions act as a base for the quality and levels of participation. Just as more verticalized communicative structures (such as those of traditional mass media) tend to concentrate decision-making processes and power, more horizontalized structures end up favoring more collaborative and democratic actions: thus, we aimed to verify the extent to which the modes of elaboration and organization of information on these platforms, operating in digital network contexts, enable broad and effective modalities of citizen action

The objective of this article is to conceptualize Echo Chambers from a literature review and to present its methodological implications for studies on the political public sphere in social network platforms. An echo chamber is a social epistemic structure in which relevant voices are actively excluded and discredited by creating ambiences of homophily. This homophily is shown when users of social networking platforms interact and associate only with similar ones, with selective exposure to content. It is associated with processes of evasion, questioning and constant search for reinforcement. This translates into the tendency to consume information aligned with previously constituted ideologies only with confirmation bias, and in the propensity to seek, choose and interpret information aligned with one's own belief system, including news that does not match reality. We conclude that it is important to untangle algorithm and user in strategies that consider the dimensions of platform technology, the communicative process of conversation and deliberation, and its concrete effects in the political sphere. Another important factor is the identification and objective delimitation of which are the homophilic patterns present in certain groups on the platforms

This research investigates the affirmation of authenticity through the sharing of everyday life on the Instagram profile of the presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro and some of his supporters, in the 2018 elections. To this end, the empirical analysis is systematized around three categories (identity, transparency and engagement) of political authenticity, proposed in the theoretical model of Gilpin, Palazzolo and Brody (2010). Starting from exploratory research with a qualitative approach, we used the abductive method to analyze materials published by this politician and some of his supporters on Instagram. Our results show that Jair Bolsonaro managed to create a supposedly authentic image through the construction of the identity of a “simple man”. That characteristic demonstrates a suppose transparency by weaving a zone of direct contact with the electorate; making it clear that as a candidate, he needed the engagement of the fans to win the dispute and defeat the “enemies of the people”, in a populist rhetoric that harmonizes with the logic of the social media

This article aims to address the use of hashtags in the digital social network of Instagram and its contribution to the algorithmic management of the platform. We investigated the hypothesis that the hashtag is an informative element that indexes and reinforces the meaning of publications and helps to track users on Instagram for mapping purposes and monetary gain by the platform and external systems. We are based on bibliographic research, in which we study the theory already published on this topic to understand the general process of capital accumulation in any socio-digital platform and the concept and use of hashtags. Hashtags complement the interactions carried out on the networks, in which users generate navigation and behavior data. We verified that the Instagram uses this data in its algorithmic treatment to optimize the distribution of contents in the profiles and its advertising targeting policy. We found that the contribution of the hashtag in this surveillance of networks is due to the fact that it is taken as information in the form of metadata that organizes and facilitates the tracking and mapping of users. To complement the bibliographic research we developed, we performed a query for a hashtag using an external system and found that, from the hashtags they use, people can be tracked not only within the Instagram platform but also outside it

In this article, we analyze the first-person discourse in audio misinformation disseminated via WhatsApp in Brazil. The corpus selected for the study includes 100 audios collected through WhatsApp Monitor between March 16 and June 15, 2020, and between March 27 and October 26, 2021. Our objectives are: (i) to verify how many audio messages that spread misinformation use first-person discourse; (ii) how it is used to get the addressee to believe what is being said in the audio; (iii) which discursive resources it triggers. Our analysis relies on the theoretical and methodological framework of Greimas' semiotics. The results point to the prevalence of procedures (first person discourse and interpellation), genres (testimony and commentary) and actors (the expert and the common person) typical of the disinformative discourse based on the use of the “I”

CoronaVac, developed in Brazil by the Butantan Institute in partnership with Sinovac, remained amid the political disputes that permeated the way our country faced the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to map and understand, in a limited period, the conversations surrounding the effectiveness of the said immunizer on the social networking site Twitter, the investigation made use of the analysis of social networks. To visualize the data, semantic maps were created that helped to identify what was being said about the effectiveness of CoronaVac, allowing the content analysis of some of the main tweets and the recognition of the most active profiles. The results point to the fact that, for the most part, network users are not against vaccination, but often question the effectiveness of the vaccine, illustrating, to some extent, the impact of the politicization of the immunizer

The relationship between hegemony and engagement is engendered at different levels, both in theory and in praxis. These are concepts that cannot be reduced to communication, but which have a fundamental level in this sphere for their realization. The objective of this article is to understand the relationships between the concepts of engagement and hegemony in the context of mediatization and platformization. As specific objectives, we seek to demonstrate the ways in which communication structures and is structured by hegemony, the challenges for popular hegemony, the implications of mediatization and platformization processes for hegemonic processes and counter-hegemonic struggles. Methodologically, we centrally adopted critical theory and used the dialectical method. The essay form characterizes our writing method