El rol de internet para romper el silencio: el ejemplo de dos casos en américa latina, Marcelo Freixo en Brasil y Sebastián Piñera en Chile

Abstract

The media are a privileged space for society to talk to itself and about itself (Franca, 2012). Currently, most households have access to the Internet, the- refore, through this new mediawe can give visibility to events and events that the so-called traditionalmedia do not want to address or insist on silencing. From this perspective, and through two examples from Brazil and Chile, we seek to deepen on how the Internet can be used as a tool to break the silencein light of current democracies influencing public opinion (Miege, 2010). As Car- don (2010) points out, the internet widens the public space, transforming the very nature of democracy. Likewise, this reflection aims to revitalize the discussion on the role of online media in the face of cases of public interest, remaining at the frontier between power and citizenship. In the cases of Chile and Brazil, the above mentioned takes on a particular meaning since traditional media, throughout history, have been controlled by governments and corporations, so that social networks and the Internet appear as spaces of autonomy ( Castells, 2012). In this context, a semio-discursive analysis was applied (Charaudeau, 1995, 2011) to different media from the network that deals with two cases of political figures, a) the official account of Marcelo Freixo on Fa- cebook and b) the articles from an electronic newspaper in Chile (El Mostrador) that link Sebastian Pinera with the Papers. The first corresponds to the candidate of the municipality of Rio de Janeiro Marcelo Freixo of PSOL, who in 2016, managed to mobilize a good part of society to reach the second round of the elections, with only 11 seconds of electoral propaganda authorized on television and on the radios. The second case corresponds to the former Chilean president, Sebastian Pinera, who during the maritime negotiations in Chile and Peru in the Hague had made investments in Peruvian companies that were based in Panama using privileged information. The theoretical and methodological aspects followed by the analysis and the main results of this investigation are presented below.