Name: Nelson Aloysio Reis de Almeida Passos
Type: MSc dissertation
Publication date: 25/03/2022
Advisor:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| Cristiana Losekann | Advisor * |
Examining board:
| Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| Breno Marques Bringel | External Examiner * |
| Cristiana Losekann | Advisor * |
| Fabio Luiz Malini de Lima | Internal Examiner * |
Summary: The decade of 2010 comprised significant social and political changes in Brazil. This thesis
aims to revisit some episodes of contentious politics, observed from 2013 to 2018 in the
country, in order to analyze virtual communities over time within a social network of wide
access and popular use in the country. Social network analysis methods were employed to
map controversies within a data set of 5 million tweets during six different episodes: i) the
June 2013 protests; ii) the presidential disputes of 2014; iii) the subsequent public
demonstrations observed in 2015; iv) 2016; v) 2017; and lastly, vi) the 2018 electoral disputes.
The proposed method allowed to evaluate a) structural aspects of the flow of resources shared
among members of the social network; b) the similarity among temporal communities,
detected by the Leiden method; and c) aspects of groups of greater relevance in each interval.
The analysis revealed a decrease in the plurality of communities initially observed, in addition
to an increased partisanship of institutional and extra-institutional actors. Furthermore, it is
argued that these processes opened space for new political groups, supported by counter-
publics and public and private organizations, whose information dissemination on digital
platforms was potentially increased by their scale-free structure, as well as the expansion of
Internet access in the country over the last decade specially in urban and densely populated
areas thus reconfiguring the post-2013 Brazilian political scenario.
Keywords: community detection; controversy mapping; contentious politics; social network
analysis; complex networks.
