Brazil’s Digital Politics and the Crisis of Democracy (2013-2018)

Abstract

Brazil is the fourth biggest digital democracy in the world, only after India, Indonesia, and the USA, with over one hundred and thirty million citizens having internet access. In Brazil, the more widespread internet and social media users have been increasingly associated with political polarization and antipartisanship. Also, wider access to digital information technology has meant that Brazilian internet users became more exposed to disinformation. In this context of polarization and antipartisanship, digital media helped to produce critical changes in the Brazilian political dynamics leading Brazil to a democratic crisis. This chapter explores the crisis of democracy in Brazil considering the country’s transition to becoming a digital democracy in 2014 when more than half of the population started having access to internet. To this end, the chapter process traces the critical political events that contributed to the Brazilian crisis of democracy as digital media normalized polarized and antisystem political discourses. This chapter concludes that digital politics poses considerable challenges to Brazilian democracy and proposes adequate institutional responses to digital social activism, suitable regulations of the new digital public spaces, and the elaboration of a new social contract to govern social and political dynamics considering the detrimental impacts of technological innovation on politics.