ICA presents. Kia ora koutou katoa. From the International Communication Association Podcast Network, welcome to Interventions from the Global South. This is your host Professor Mohan Dutta. Today we have the honor of having Professor Viktor Chagas with us. Viktor is a professor and researcher at the Fluminense Federal University. His Ph.D. is in History, Politics, and Cultural Goods from the Centre of Research and Documentation on Brazilian Contemporary History at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation. He is an associate member of the National Institute of Science and Technology for Digital Democracy. Currently, he is also an executive board member at the Brazilian Association of Political Communication Researchers and the editor-in-chief of the journal Revista Compolítica. He is the leader of the Laboratory of Research on Communication, Political Cultures, and Collaborative Economy (coLAB), as well as the coordinator of the extension project #MUSEUdeMEMES (#MemesMuseum). Thank you so much for taking the time to join me. Perhaps we can begin a little bit by talking about how you understand the Global South from your location in Brazil.
Mohan, thank you very much for this invitation. Let me just introduce a bit of my point of view, because I'm an expert researcher on humor and politics. When it comes to humor, we have much to think about because the way we laugh is also a colonized experience. The way we tell jokes, the way we react to some jokes, is also a pattern. So we have to deconstruct this way of thinking to understand how we can perceive other forms of humor. In the case of Brazil, for instance, we have to recognize a kind of affirmative humor that we usually make use of, because most of our jokes — jokes with our disgrace, jokes with our bad experience, jokes with our poverty or misery — it's also laughing on our own misery. So it's very much different from the humor we generally understand from the Global North.
You talk briefly upon this notion of colonization. So I would love for you to expand on that a little bit, particularly in terms of the complexities of colonization in Brazil as it negotiates the empire on one hand, and on the other hand, with its own history of colonialism and dispossession of indigenous people.
Brazil was colonized by Portugal during the Middle Ages. And we have much in common with other African countries' colonization process, except for African countries not only were colonized but they were also expropriated, because we have a huge history on slavery. Brazil was one of the latest countries to abolish slavery in Latin America. So we are in the middle point between the colonizer and the colonized. We have to recognize this intersection to understand how Brazil deals with this identity because we, for instance, took much time to recognize that we were also a racist country. Brazil was a colonized country that took some colonizer stances for some relations. But we also do not have a rupture with Portugal the way other colonized countries had when they proclaimed their independence. Brazil has also a peculiar position in this context: We still have good relations with Portugal. This is very curious because Portugal became a new colonized metropolis because we now export much of our cultural production to Portugal's consumption. But turning back to my research, again, it's very curious the way we deal with this relation from the humorous perspective also, because political humor studies usually investigates the local humor aspects in each country to identify which are the ethnic groups, or which are the national identity groups, that works mostly as the butt of the jokes. When some scholars like Christie Davies compare jokes from different countries, one thing that he says is that most of the countries have the same jokes except for the butt of the jokes — the characters exchange in order to be the victims of the jokes. And in Brazil, it's very curious because we have some jokes that we tell here that are exactly the same jokes that Portuguese people tell there. But when Portuguese people tell these jokes, they identify a specific local group they call the Alentejanos — people who live beyond the river Tejo, they call the Alentejanos, one of these identities they use as the victims of the jokes. But in Brazil, we tell the same jokes using Portuguese people as the butt of the jokes. And this started at the end of the 19th century, when we turned into a republic. We experienced a moment when national symbols — the national anthem, the national flag, and the national colors — were reformulated to separate Brazil from Portugal. One thing we noticed is that people started to tell jokes about Portuguese people in order to affirm a national identity also. So once more, humor is an important element from this independence process.
I wanted to turn a little bit to your research, particularly the memes in the digital ecosystem of the far right. When I look at that scholarship, I see quite a lot of convergence with the memes we see with the far right Hindutva ecosystem in India, for instance. So could you speak to what you see conceptually in the digital infrastructure of memes? And what do we learn from that regarding digital spaces, hate and the Global South?
Indeed, I also think we have a lot in common, not only with India, but also with other Global South countries, and also with other countries that are recently experiencing a new populist government. One thing I've been particularly interested in understanding is this use of a populist rhetoric to build a far right humor. It's an important element from the so-called alt-right identity, this new far right that emerged in recent years in different countries, and that uses a kind of ludic experience, a ludic language to interact not only with their peers, but also with their audiences to conquer a wider audience through these ludic interactions. So this is my main focus on research right now. And I've been very interested in understanding how they make use not only of a populist rhetoric, but also some common repertoires from a Global South perspective. You can say that most of this far right humor in Brazil has much to do with the far right humor in India, for instance, if you are particularly concerned within the channels or within the digital platforms they make use of. For instance, WhatsApp has a very large audience in Brazil or in India. It's a very peculiar thing, because the way this far right humor circulates in private communication services allows for misinformation, disinformation, and also some conspiracy theories in a way that open digital platforms like X, or other platforms like Instagram, doesn't allow. They are organized into private groups. You do not have access, for instance, or the amount of groups that exist in WhatsApp, you do not have ways to search for a new group instead of having a private invitation link. So you cannot understand the whole thing. This is a very difficult environment to research and also a very difficult environment to monitor. If we are concerned in understanding how some anti-democratic contents, how disinformation, how conspiracy information circulates in these environments, you have a really hard time to monitor environments such as WhatsApp or Telegram or Signal. If you are to face an authoritarian government, these kinds of tools are very effective in the way you can organize subversive groups. You can criticize the government privately. But when you are facing a democratic government, and you are facing an emergence of a far right government — in these contexts, you have to be worried about the use of these opaque environments because they really make much more difficult for anyone to understand how dangerous speech circulates in a very intense and fast way.
This concept of digital astroturfs that you refer to — Could you speak a little bit more about that, particularly in terms of the implications of digital astroturfing for far right, populist governments in democracies?
This was my first approach to this environment. I was studying in order to capture a layer of humorous messages that we simply could not access from other open platforms. But when I entered WhatsApp, it was 2018 in Brazil. I previously started to research the Brazilian 2018 elections that elected Bolsonaro here. I observed that these far right groups already had a very structured ecosystem of different groups. Each group performed different functions. So you have a group that organized public choreographies supporting Bolsonaro, you have groups that organized motorcades, you have groups that sell T shirts, you have groups that discuss politics. I tried to engage within these groups using a covert research strategy, because once I identified myself as a researcher, I would be immediately banned from these groups. Also, once I identified myself as a researcher, I was immediately subjected to security risks. So I used covert research, which is a strategy of not deliberately not identifying myself as a researcher to observe these environments. I tried to understand how content circulated, which were the main users, the main senders of these contents, and a bit from an ethnographic point of view, trying to understand these activities. But I also noticed that most of the content circulated, most of the users that sent the majority of the messages were not as organic as they said. They clearly assumed some behavior that one could identify as inauthentic behavior, because some of these users, for instance, sent the very same message for the very same groups during the morning, during the afternoon, during the evening, and also during the night, in order to capture the attention of different users. They spread these messages systematically in a way that no spontaneous user, no organic user could do. They were clearly a professional agent intervening in this environment. So I started to look at this to understand these patterns. And one concept that was very useful for me was the astroturfing concept. The astroturfing concept already existed before, of course, but most of the time it was discussed in only a theoretical way. You do not have much empirical literature to discuss these nuances of a practical environment of a political agent performing a spontaneous supporter of a politician. I tried to understand these patterns in an empirical way, using the concept of astroturfing and dealing with these concepts in a multi-method approach — using most of the time an ethnographic approach together with a social network analysis, and also some descriptive statistics, to understand the circulation of these contents in these environments, and how we could identify these astroturfing patterns within these WhatsApp groups I was observing.
When engaging in research and exploring contexts such as, say, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp — you talk about this as covert research. There are two questions that come to me. One is how do you negotiate human ethics, particularly a question of consent when doing this work? And two, how do you safeguard yourself given as we see with these far right populist movements across the Global South, the weaponization of violence targeting academies that are researching these phenomena?
Yeah, these are the two main ethical concerns I've been dealing with. And they are very important for my research. For instance, we just received a threat of attack in my university, the Fluminense Federal University, the week before this week. My research group was one of the direct recipients of the message, because the one that sent the message clearly knows that our group deals with far right groups in Brazil. So we are very much exposed. And this is the reason for not saying the name of the groups, for not saying some details that could identify the environment in which I am in. For instance, I do not use my personal phone. We took a lot of precautions. And also, we also have to deal with some private aspects, because we are also dealing with personal data. So we cannot share the phone numbers of any people we identify within these groups. Although I know lots of deputy senators that are together with me within these groups, spreading misinformation, spreading conspiracy theories, I cannot identify them publicly because these are some personal data. This is a research strategy that I would not like to undertake if I wasn't researching these specific far right clusters. This is a safety prerogative I'm using just for these kinds of subjects I'm dealing with now.
It's really impressive and powerful because it decenters the whiteness of hegemonic political communication research. Could you speak to that in terms of the ways in which the method you use decenters the dominant approaches to doing political communication research? And then what are the challenges going forward in building an infrastructure of doing political communication work from the Global South that decenters the hegemonic approaches?
Political communication is a scholarly field that is mostly hegemonically concerned with a Global North perspective. Most of our literature, most of our theoretical perspectives are still not very much open to a Global South point of view, to a Global South critique. This has a deep effect not only on our research, but also in the way we can communicate our research. Because journals, for instance, are not clearly open to publish some of these productions except when they note a contextual or case study with potential. For instance, whenever you say about Bolsonaro government, people indeed pay attention a bit of what you were doing. But whenever you say that your interest is not to comment the Brazilian circumstantial scenario, the Brazilian conjuncture, but to develop a theoretical point of view in order to understand how far right digital humor in Brazil connects with far right digital humor in the United States, people are not so open to receive these critiques. It's very common. It's not an exclusivity of the political communication field. But in the political communication field, we have suffered this double bind. It's very difficult to negotiate the way you can enter this field. But one positive thing that Bolsonaro left us was this perspective that Brazil is an important player to understand much of what's happening here is also happening in India, the United States, in some African countries and some Eastern European countries. So we have to understand this whole scenario. We have to understand that much of this far right emergence is not an exclusivity of the United States. It's a wave. It's also happening in other countries, and it's still very difficult to show people this importance.
What do you think other kinds of communicative devices and resources that are necessary to decenter the field?
We have different layers to deal with. We have a layer of a centered scientific production, because most of the sponsors are looking for research laboratories that are based in Global North countries. So we have to decenter these sponsors from the start, but we also have to decenter the gatekeeper aspect you mentioned. Because most of the journals are also based in Global North countries. For instance, we have different humor studies journals based in Western European countries. We in the Global South read what they produce, but they do not read what we produce. We do not have an international human studies journal based in a Global South country. We sometimes have to publish a Global South study discussing Brazilian humor in a European journal of humor research. We have to decenter also the language. We are the one and only country from Latin America that do not speak Spanish. So we have a language barrier. Sometimes we are lost in the translation. We are a country as large as the United States, but the United States already speaks English and we do not. So although India also has other local dialects, other local languages, the official language of India is also English. But in Brazil, it is not. So we are both Global South countries, but we have singularities within this aspect. So we have to think about these singularities carefully to understand how we can decenter this production.
Thank you so much Viktor.
Thank you, thank you. It was a pleasure.
This episode of Interventions from the Global South podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network. The show is sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University Qatar, producing and promoting evidence-based storytelling focused on histories, cultures, and media of the Global South. This episode is produced by Dominic Bonelli. Our executive producer is Alison Casler. The theme music is by Sleeping Ghost. If you’d like to hear more about the participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, please check the show notes in the episode description. Thanks for listening.
