Dictatorship of political correctness: the rhetoric of the new right on Brazilian YouTube

• Grant number: 24/00155-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: February 01, 2024
• End date: January 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - Political Behavior
• Principal Investigator: Rúrion Soares Melo
• Grantee: Caio de Vasconcelos Durazzo
• Host Institution: Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (CEBRAP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 19/22387-0 - Crises of democracy: critical theory and the diagnosis of present time, AP.TEM

Abstract

Social media is a very influential communication medium in the main current political phenomena, for example, in the rise of the new right in Brazil (Rocha, 2021). However, the YouTube, the largest online video consumption platform in the country, lacks attention in studies that treat social media as important in contemporary political phenomena (Reis; Zanetti; Frizzera, 2019). This platform must be considered by researchers because it has a particularity in relation to other social media, through its video recommendation system the YouTube has become aenvironment for easy dissemination of conservative and reactionary content, such as debates againstnotions of social justice and human rights (Reis; Zanetti; Frizzera, 2019). This type of content, based on Habermas' concept of public sphere and the post-habermasian constructions about counterpublics, was called "right-wing counterpublicity" (Medeiros, 2022). The concept deals with a rhetorical style that aims to break with the current norms of decorum in public discourse with hostility, offenses and aggression(Medeiros, 2022). With this discursive strategy, the new right counterpublics produce empty signifiers or native categories, for example, the "political correctness", as part of a process of delegitimization of social, political and cultural advances and rights achieved in the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, which led to the "pact of 88" or public sphere post-bourgeois (Medeiros, 2022). The term "political correctness" originated in the USA and associated with the spectrumpolitician on the country's liberal left (Júnior, 2017). And, because it is a native term, it is almost always used to offend opponents (Júnior, 2017). The political right, then, throughof the term, attacks public policies and left-wing normative positions (Júnior, 2017). The conservative leaders treat "political correctness" as a plan of progressivism to dominate the population through cultural institutions (Ortellado; Moretto, 2022). That resentment on the part of conservatives towards "political correctness" is also intensified by social media due to the collapse of contexts (Ortellado; Moretto, 2022). In Brazil, "political correctness" is often characterized as the imposition of values and cultural patterns, in an authoritarian way, by a State commanded by the ideology leftist from the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Júnior, 2017).Therefore, to understand the aspects of right-wing counterpublicity in the social media, the objective of the research is to investigate the characteristics of the debate on "politicallycorrectness" in light of the discourse of new right counterpublics on Brazilian YouTube. For that, will be used videos that deal with "political correctness" on the channel "Os Pingos nos Is" , the Brazilian far-right channel with the most views on YouTube (Dip et al., 2022). Therefore, it is planned to extract quantitative data via the YouTube Data Tools tool (Rieder,2015); extract spoken content using the Google2SRT tool and perform an categorical analysis of content (Sampaio; Lycarião, 2021).