Last Wednesday (September 25), the team from the Laboratory of Internet and Social Network Studies at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (NetLab UFRJ) held a live workshop at the postgraduate course in Digital Humanities at King's College London, through a partnership with Professor Paolo Gerbaudo, director of the institution's Center for Digital Culture.
The focus of the activity was to present the methodological explorations made by NetLab UFRJ in research related to computational propaganda in case studies involving social networks, politics and collective action.
The presentation was led by researchers Marie Santini and Débora Salles, and was based on three previous works by the group: “Media and Mediators in Contemporary Protests”, from 2013; “Software Power as Soft Power: A Literature Review on Computational Propaganda Effects in Public Opinion and Political Process”, 2018; and “Online Impersonators: Who are They and What do They do? A Bot Ethnography on Rio de Janeiro's 2016 Municipal Elections”. This last study was presented a few days earlier at the Internet, Policy & Politics Conference, held at the University of Oxford.
Reputable partnership
The partnership between NetLab and professor Paolo Gerbaudo strengthened the debate on the interaction between social media, politics and collective action, and reiterated a contact that began a few years ago in Brazil, during Gerbaudo's work on his first book "Tweets and the Streets : Social Media and Contemporary Activism”, which critically assessed the impact of social media on the 2011 wave of movements, from the Arab Spring to the Spanish 'indignados' and Occupy Wall Street.