“Janones Guevara” or: Brazil is the biggest human digital powerhouse in the world

Orkut was already part of everyday life in Brazil when I moved to London in 2004. A few years later, the Facebook craze took off there, and I had that feeling of déjà vu—except that it usually works the other way around. Whatever happens in wealthy countries eventually makes its way here, whether in fashion, entertainment, or social habits.

Then came #MeuPrimeiroAssédio ("My First Harassment"), which in 2015 preceded the global impact of #MeToo by two years. Pick any social network and Brazilians will be there, probably finding uses for it that the platform itself never anticipated. It is as if the same uninhibited Carnival spirit that drives us to take over the streets gives us the freedom to storm the digital public square and make it our own.

This election not only confirmed that impression but filled me with hope. I saw our ability to take over social media become a coordinated force. Facing the Megazord of Silicon Valley and "Militia Valley," as Gregório Duvivier so aptly put it—with Big Tech, betting companies, militias, billionaires, and the US government’s new wave of imperialism—felt like taking on forces far greater than our own. As if we were Ukraine being invaded by Russia, except that in this case the battle was being fought in the digital arena, precisely where we are the best in the world.

In the past, the tools of mass manipulation relied more heavily on traditional media and/or state and military psyops (psychological operations). Data collection and campaign microtargeting, which allow ads to be aimed at highly specific audiences, gave this manipulation new levels of reach and precision. The far right knew how to exploit this terrain, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal brought these mechanisms to the world’s attention.

Until then, I had never seen an organized response to this weaponization of social media that gave me so much hope. Brazil managed to organize itself to take on the bots and build an army of "human bots": real people acting in coordination, taking action on search engines and posting across the major social networks to fight for a voice on platforms that also feed on outrage-driven engagement, known as rage bait.

This is where Janones comes in, the firebrand from Minas Gerais who helped coordinate this mobilization with his army of more than 10 million soldiers on WhatsApp. He could become a kind of twenty-first-century Che Guevara, not through the idealization of his image, but through the possibility of sharing a practice of resistance across Latin America. If other countries can draw on this experience, we will once again be reversing the flow that surprised me in London. This time, by exporting our way of occupying the digital public square to resist digital invasions.