Modern censorship and technopopulism — Bárbara Viana Bezerra Nobre’s (UFPE) e Maria Enesia da Silva Neta’s (UFC) review of “A máquina do ódio: notas de uma repórter sobre fake news e violência digital”, by Patrícia Campos Mello
Abstract: Patrícia Campos Mello’s Máquina do ódio discusses the manipulation of information on social networks and their impacts on global elections. The work blends the author’s personal experiences with analyzes of techniques such as Firehoseing and Microtargeting, highlighting the threat to press freedom and democracy.
Keywords: Hate, social networks, abd fake news.
The book A máquina do ódio, by journalist Patrícia Campos Mello portrays the use of social networks in manipulating information sensitive to elections around the world. With a journalistic character and published in 2020 by Companhia das Letras, the book contains notes on the reporter’s personal experience and the backstage of some of his reports, aiming to highlight an alarming scenario of attacks on press freedom and threats to democracy.
Patrícia Toledo de Campos Mello is an award -winning Brazilian journalist, commentator and writer. He is a reporter and columnist for Folha de S. Paulo, having started his career in 1993 as a reporter in the extinct Jornal da Tarde. In 2018, he published a report denouncing abuse of economic power in mass messages on WhatsApp in favor of the then presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. One of his sources, a former Yacows company employee, lied in a statement at CPMI of Fake News, held in February 2020, stating that the reporter would have been sexually imposed in exchange for information. In addition, the elected candidate himself, Bolsonaro, and his son deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro issued a series of public offenses and attacks, feeding their hallucinated army of followers in defamation campaigns, threats and lies against Patricia. The journalist won compensation for moral damages in 2021 by the São Paulo Court of Justice. The work is structured in introduction, four chapters, conclusion and epilogue.
Starting from a historical perspective, with mention of Volkspfänger popular radio as a Nazi Germany tool, in the first chapter of the work, the author highlights Brazil as one of the world’s biggest markets for apps like Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram and how these applications They are used to disseminate false news in countries in countries such as India, Hungary, the United States and Brazil. Analyzing techniques such as the Firehosing (flood of manipulated news), microtageting (messages built specifically for certain population segments) and astroturfing (dissemination of hyperpartisan content using third parties), the journalist narrates the backstage of her report on illegal firing. Massa by WhatsApp in the 2018 elections by Jair Bolsonaro sympathizers and the internal operation of marketing agencies that illegally use data (such as CPFs) of Brazilian citizens, especially elderly, performing a kind of outsourcing of Caixa two.
In the second chapter, by narrating attacks on women’s journalists such as herself, Talita Fernandes and Marina Dias da Folha de São Paulo, Vera Magalhães do Estadão, Juliana Dal Piva and Costança Resende do UOL, as well as Miriam Leitão of Globo News, all responsible For articles revealing illegalities and crimes involving the Bolsonaro family, the author describes a new form of censorship against the press directed to female journalists, unlike the one practiced by totalitarian military governments, but derived from democratically elected governments, using trolls , cyber robots, social networks and digital militias. She points out that one aspect of this dynamic is the rise of a machismo and ancestral primitivism released momentarily. It also generates a form of self -censorship by the psychological terror caused by these professionals, a hate machine that “faces them as mere helpful factoids” (p.103).
The third chapter deals with the rise marked by the post-truth age of populist leaders around the world, such as Donald Trump in 2016 in the United States. The journalist tells her meeting with right -wing ideologist Steve Bannon, creator of The Movement, a group that promotes hate speeches in several countries and was one of the advisers of Bolsonaro’s campaign to presidency. According to the journalist, for this movement, communism is all political stance on the left of fascism and that needs to be violently fought. The Populist Technology Ascension had strongly the action and omission of social networks, such as illegal collection and immoral use of data from users who served as the basic manipulation, exposed in the scandal involving the company Cambridge Analytica.
In the fourth and last chapter, forms of choke of traditional communication vehicles are exposed, such as the impossibility of competition with the digital universe and financing difficulties, which hosts them with government and business whims. Moreover, the construction of direct information sources through channels linked to politicians or parties, without going through journalistic, is intended to shield them against criticism or questions, and corrode the credibility in the traditional media and “stirring militancy against the common ‘enemy’ (p. 159). Techniques placed by populists such as Orbán, Modi, Trump, Duterte and Putin are copied elsewhere, as in Brazil. With Bolsonaro, press attacks and journalists personally fired like never before in the country’s history.
In this chapter, the author also mentions attempts by press groups to regain the lost trust throughout the transformations that occurred in the communication industry such as Trust Project, carried out by newspapers such as Economist, El País, Washington Post, La Republica, Folha de St. Paul the people, 360 and nexus. The author explores the initiatives of these vehicles from the perspective of establishing articles and vehicle credibility assessment mechanisms along with platforms algorithms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, to be informed to the user a series of characteristics that make them more or less reliable .
In its conclusion, the journalist finds a kind of resurgence of the importance of a free and democratic press in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time as newspapers and other vehicles have undergone serious financial difficulties, having to cut a relevant part of their staff and funding of journalistic productions, there was growth of subscribers amid the avalanche of false news produced, incredibly, and not only, by Brazilian government itself, with attacks on science and policies of social distancing, negationism, advertising of ineffective and dangerous medicines, the virus connection with China and one of globalist communism.
In a “retreat of the wave of expertise aversion” (p. 213), it would be necessary to promote this rediscovery of journalism and the fight against the global manipulation of public opinion.
USP researchers from São Carlos created a fake news check site | Photo: Reprodução EPTV/G1
It can be observed the multidisciplinarity of the work in based on historical contextualizations and tools for sociological and media analysis, seeking to describe modern elements of manipulation of media and political narratives, using digital platforms and complex data collection and segmentation systems of users around the world. For example, it is possible to conclude that the domain of WhatsApp in the Brazilian and Indian elections of 2018, to the detriment of the use of Facebook in the US 2016 elections, points to the migration of these elements to an encrypted platform, whose detection of false news and hate speeches and hate speeches detection. It is shown to be more painful, which reveals some of the ways of improvement of these manipulation techniques. The journalist permeates this theme transiting through areas such as sociology, communication, history, psychology and economics.
The work reflects the outdated belief that societies possessing greater access to information and the media would be more advanced. Perception that falls apart when analyzing obscurantist scenarios, negasters, extremists and the intense polarization generated through the use of digital platforms, whose algorithms are isolate similar ideas and conceptions of the world and create a shield of divergence, questioning and critical thinking. These scenarios replicate hate discourses in various spheres, such as scientific, historical, social, cultural and economic, with systematic techniques, financing and political organization.
Without attributing supernatural powers of brainwashing capacity of Big Techs, the journalist points to this enormous ideological polarization resulting from the inflammation of more extremist ideas that generate greater engagement in networks and seek to terrorize, shock and disinform a large portion of the population. Nothing more current than the growing debate about the need to mapping social networks and the search for sources of hate speeches. However, the book does not make a more systematic analysis of practices of the traditional media itself that are anchored in bonds with scruit economic interests and, more subtly, also influence the direction of political and economic decisions. Despite the concentration of the media monopoly should be viewed by different prisms, the work describes well the bowels of this complex machine of hatred that has been guiding the public debate and directing elections around the world.
Summary of A máquina do ódio
Introdução. Como as redes sociais me transformaram em uma “jornalistinha” comunista
1. A eleição do WhatsApp no Brasil
2. Assassinato de reputações. Uma nova forma de censura
3. Fatos alternativos e a ascensão de populistas no mundo
4. Bolsonaro e o manual de Viktor Orbán para acabar com a mídia crítica
Conclusão. Será que uma pandemia pode salvar o jornalismo?
Epílogo
Reviewers
Barbara Viana Bezerra Nobre holds a master’s degree in Environmental Technology and Water Resources from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE), PhD student at the Graduate Program in Development and Environment of the Universidade Federal do Ceará (Prodema/UFC). ID LATTES: https://lattes.cnpq.br/6686605653346916. ID ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7516-5067; E-mail: [email protected].
MELLO, Patrícia Campos. A máquina do ódio: notas de uma repórter sobre fake news e violência digital. São Paulo: Companhia das letras, 2020. 296p. Review by: NOBRE, Bárbara Viana Bezerra; SILVA NETA, Maria Enesia. Censura Moderna e Tecnopopulismo. Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v.3, n.13, Set/Oct, 2023. Available at <Modern censorship and technopopulism — Bárbara Viana Bezerra Nobre’s (UFPE) e Maria Enesia da Silva Neta’s (UFC) review of “A máquina do ódio: notas de uma repórter sobre fake news e violência digital”, by Patrícia Campos Mello – Crítica Historiografica (criticahistoriografica.com.br)>.
Modern censorship and technopopulism — Bárbara Viana Bezerra Nobre’s (UFPE) e Maria Enesia da Silva Neta’s (UFC) review of “A máquina do ódio: notas de uma repórter sobre fake news e violência digital”, by Patrícia Campos Mello
Abstract: Patrícia Campos Mello’s Máquina do ódio discusses the manipulation of information on social networks and their impacts on global elections. The work blends the author’s personal experiences with analyzes of techniques such as Firehoseing and Microtargeting, highlighting the threat to press freedom and democracy.
Keywords: Hate, social networks, abd fake news.
The book A máquina do ódio, by journalist Patrícia Campos Mello portrays the use of social networks in manipulating information sensitive to elections around the world. With a journalistic character and published in 2020 by Companhia das Letras, the book contains notes on the reporter’s personal experience and the backstage of some of his reports, aiming to highlight an alarming scenario of attacks on press freedom and threats to democracy.
Patrícia Toledo de Campos Mello is an award -winning Brazilian journalist, commentator and writer. He is a reporter and columnist for Folha de S. Paulo, having started his career in 1993 as a reporter in the extinct Jornal da Tarde. In 2018, he published a report denouncing abuse of economic power in mass messages on WhatsApp in favor of the then presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. One of his sources, a former Yacows company employee, lied in a statement at CPMI of Fake News, held in February 2020, stating that the reporter would have been sexually imposed in exchange for information. In addition, the elected candidate himself, Bolsonaro, and his son deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro issued a series of public offenses and attacks, feeding their hallucinated army of followers in defamation campaigns, threats and lies against Patricia. The journalist won compensation for moral damages in 2021 by the São Paulo Court of Justice. The work is structured in introduction, four chapters, conclusion and epilogue.
Starting from a historical perspective, with mention of Volkspfänger popular radio as a Nazi Germany tool, in the first chapter of the work, the author highlights Brazil as one of the world’s biggest markets for apps like Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram and how these applications They are used to disseminate false news in countries in countries such as India, Hungary, the United States and Brazil. Analyzing techniques such as the Firehosing (flood of manipulated news), microtageting (messages built specifically for certain population segments) and astroturfing (dissemination of hyperpartisan content using third parties), the journalist narrates the backstage of her report on illegal firing. Massa by WhatsApp in the 2018 elections by Jair Bolsonaro sympathizers and the internal operation of marketing agencies that illegally use data (such as CPFs) of Brazilian citizens, especially elderly, performing a kind of outsourcing of Caixa two.
In the second chapter, by narrating attacks on women’s journalists such as herself, Talita Fernandes and Marina Dias da Folha de São Paulo, Vera Magalhães do Estadão, Juliana Dal Piva and Costança Resende do UOL, as well as Miriam Leitão of Globo News, all responsible For articles revealing illegalities and crimes involving the Bolsonaro family, the author describes a new form of censorship against the press directed to female journalists, unlike the one practiced by totalitarian military governments, but derived from democratically elected governments, using trolls , cyber robots, social networks and digital militias. She points out that one aspect of this dynamic is the rise of a machismo and ancestral primitivism released momentarily. It also generates a form of self -censorship by the psychological terror caused by these professionals, a hate machine that “faces them as mere helpful factoids” (p.103).
The third chapter deals with the rise marked by the post-truth age of populist leaders around the world, such as Donald Trump in 2016 in the United States. The journalist tells her meeting with right -wing ideologist Steve Bannon, creator of The Movement, a group that promotes hate speeches in several countries and was one of the advisers of Bolsonaro’s campaign to presidency. According to the journalist, for this movement, communism is all political stance on the left of fascism and that needs to be violently fought. The Populist Technology Ascension had strongly the action and omission of social networks, such as illegal collection and immoral use of data from users who served as the basic manipulation, exposed in the scandal involving the company Cambridge Analytica.
In the fourth and last chapter, forms of choke of traditional communication vehicles are exposed, such as the impossibility of competition with the digital universe and financing difficulties, which hosts them with government and business whims. Moreover, the construction of direct information sources through channels linked to politicians or parties, without going through journalistic, is intended to shield them against criticism or questions, and corrode the credibility in the traditional media and “stirring militancy against the common ‘enemy’ (p. 159). Techniques placed by populists such as Orbán, Modi, Trump, Duterte and Putin are copied elsewhere, as in Brazil. With Bolsonaro, press attacks and journalists personally fired like never before in the country’s history.
In this chapter, the author also mentions attempts by press groups to regain the lost trust throughout the transformations that occurred in the communication industry such as Trust Project, carried out by newspapers such as Economist, El País, Washington Post, La Republica, Folha de St. Paul the people, 360 and nexus. The author explores the initiatives of these vehicles from the perspective of establishing articles and vehicle credibility assessment mechanisms along with platforms algorithms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, to be informed to the user a series of characteristics that make them more or less reliable .
In its conclusion, the journalist finds a kind of resurgence of the importance of a free and democratic press in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time as newspapers and other vehicles have undergone serious financial difficulties, having to cut a relevant part of their staff and funding of journalistic productions, there was growth of subscribers amid the avalanche of false news produced, incredibly, and not only, by Brazilian government itself, with attacks on science and policies of social distancing, negationism, advertising of ineffective and dangerous medicines, the virus connection with China and one of globalist communism.
In a “retreat of the wave of expertise aversion” (p. 213), it would be necessary to promote this rediscovery of journalism and the fight against the global manipulation of public opinion.
USP researchers from São Carlos created a fake news check site | Photo: Reprodução EPTV/G1
It can be observed the multidisciplinarity of the work in based on historical contextualizations and tools for sociological and media analysis, seeking to describe modern elements of manipulation of media and political narratives, using digital platforms and complex data collection and segmentation systems of users around the world. For example, it is possible to conclude that the domain of WhatsApp in the Brazilian and Indian elections of 2018, to the detriment of the use of Facebook in the US 2016 elections, points to the migration of these elements to an encrypted platform, whose detection of false news and hate speeches and hate speeches detection. It is shown to be more painful, which reveals some of the ways of improvement of these manipulation techniques. The journalist permeates this theme transiting through areas such as sociology, communication, history, psychology and economics.
The work reflects the outdated belief that societies possessing greater access to information and the media would be more advanced. Perception that falls apart when analyzing obscurantist scenarios, negasters, extremists and the intense polarization generated through the use of digital platforms, whose algorithms are isolate similar ideas and conceptions of the world and create a shield of divergence, questioning and critical thinking. These scenarios replicate hate discourses in various spheres, such as scientific, historical, social, cultural and economic, with systematic techniques, financing and political organization.
Without attributing supernatural powers of brainwashing capacity of Big Techs, the journalist points to this enormous ideological polarization resulting from the inflammation of more extremist ideas that generate greater engagement in networks and seek to terrorize, shock and disinform a large portion of the population. Nothing more current than the growing debate about the need to mapping social networks and the search for sources of hate speeches. However, the book does not make a more systematic analysis of practices of the traditional media itself that are anchored in bonds with scruit economic interests and, more subtly, also influence the direction of political and economic decisions. Despite the concentration of the media monopoly should be viewed by different prisms, the work describes well the bowels of this complex machine of hatred that has been guiding the public debate and directing elections around the world.
Summary of A máquina do ódio
Introdução. Como as redes sociais me transformaram em uma “jornalistinha” comunista
1. A eleição do WhatsApp no Brasil
2. Assassinato de reputações. Uma nova forma de censura
3. Fatos alternativos e a ascensão de populistas no mundo
4. Bolsonaro e o manual de Viktor Orbán para acabar com a mídia crítica
Conclusão. Será que uma pandemia pode salvar o jornalismo?
Epílogo
Reviewers
Barbara Viana Bezerra Nobre holds a master’s degree in Environmental Technology and Water Resources from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE), PhD student at the Graduate Program in Development and Environment of the Universidade Federal do Ceará (Prodema/UFC). ID LATTES: https://lattes.cnpq.br/6686605653346916. ID ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7516-5067; E-mail: [email protected].
MELLO, Patrícia Campos. A máquina do ódio: notas de uma repórter sobre fake news e violência digital. São Paulo: Companhia das letras, 2020. 296p. Review by: NOBRE, Bárbara Viana Bezerra; SILVA NETA, Maria Enesia. Censura Moderna e Tecnopopulismo. Crítica Historiográfica. Natal, v.3, n.13, Set/Oct, 2023. Available at <Modern censorship and technopopulism — Bárbara Viana Bezerra Nobre’s (UFPE) e Maria Enesia da Silva Neta’s (UFC) review of “A máquina do ódio: notas de uma repórter sobre fake news e violência digital”, by Patrícia Campos Mello – Crítica Historiografica (criticahistoriografica.com.br)>.
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Barbara Viana Bezerra Nobre holds a master’s degree in Environmental Technology and Water Resources from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE), PhD student at the Graduate Program in Development and Environment of the Universidade Federal do Ceará (Prodema/UFC). ID LATTES: https://lattes.cnpq.br/6686605653346916. ID ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7516-5067; E-mail: [email protected].
Maria Enesia da Silva Neta holds a master’s degree in rural economy from the Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC), doctoral student at the Graduate Program in Development and Environment of the Universidade Federal do Ceará (Prodema/UFC). ID LATTES: http://lattes.cnpq.br/5898091065972854; ID ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-4682-0797; E-mail: [email protected].
