Abstract
Brazil held its presidential elections in 2018. In this context, the Socialism and Liberty Party (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade [PSOL]) chose two candidates who were members of social movements to run as candidates for president and vice-president: Guilherme Boulos from the Homeless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto [MTST]) and Sonia Guajajara from the Articulation of the Brazilian Indigenous Peoples’ Movement (Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil [APIB]). This chapter argues that this represents a strategy of “connective politics” in which the party borrows some of the movements’ causes and turns them into relatable personalized messages. In order to illustrate this, the authors chose one video from each of the social actors (PSOL, MTST, and APIB) and used YouTube’s Data Tools to map out each video’s network of related videos. By doing so, they hope to shed light on how political strategies and algorithms interact, delving into the ways in which YouTube mediates political audiovisual content through its recommendation system.
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Notes
- 1.
Available at <https://www.statista.com/statistics/578364/countries-with-most-instagram-users/>, <https://www.statista.com/statistics/280685/number-of-monthly-unique-youtube-users/>, and <https://link.estadao.com.br/noticias/empresas,whatsapp-chega-a-120-milhoes-de-usuarios-no-brasil,70001817647>. Web, August 2018.
- 2.
The complete spreadsheet can be obtained from the authors upon request.
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Medrado, A., do Vale, S., Cabral, A. (2019). Connective Politics, Videos, and Algorithms: YouTube’s Mediation of Audiovisual Political Communication. In: Veneti, A., Jackson, D., Lilleker, D.G. (eds) Visual Political Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18729-3_14
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