This case study is part of the line of research Gender Misinformation and Hate Speech, at NetLab UFRJ. We investigated various communication campaigns that attack, defame, violate and devalue women and their rights over digital platforms.
We develop computational and digital methods to understand the scale, dynamics, impacts and content of online gender-based violence.
We study cases that gain prominence in the media and on the public agenda in order to map, systemically and over multiple platforms, the strategies and discourses used against women on the networks
We chose to study the disputing narratives on the allegations against the public figure Marcius Melhem, as an emblematic case study of the debate on sexual harassment against women in Brazil.
The overall aim of this analysis is to go beyond narratives, observing the strategies of content production and distribution, as well as user interactions, to understand the possible dynamics of coordination and audience incitement.
For each stage of analysis, we present the methods and results obtained, indicating which cases showed signs of coordination and what the evidence of the impact of these strategies on online public opinion is.
The data collections were made between May and July 2023. In total, we analyzed 77,898 public social media posts and press articles. All data used in this study is publicly accessible information, therefore it does not require an ethics committee approval to carry out the research.