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  4. Analyzing the "Sleeping Giants" Activism Model in Brazil
 
conference paper

Analyzing the "Sleeping Giants" Activism Model in Brazil

Ribeiro, Barbara Gomes
•
Ribeiro, Manoel Horta  
•
Almeida, Virgilio
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January 1, 2022
Proceedings Of The 14Th Acm Web Science Conference, Websci 2022
14th ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci)

In 2020, amidst the COVID pandemic and a polarized political climate, the Sleeping Giants online activist movement gained traction in Brazil. Its rationale was simple: to curb the spread of disinformation by harming the advertising revenue of sources that produce this type of content. Like its international counterparts, Sleeping Giants Brasil (SGBR) campaigned against media outlets using Twitter to ask companies to remove ads from the targeted outlets. This work presents a thorough quantitative characterization of this activism model, analyzing the three campaigns carried out by SGBR between May and September 2020. To do so, we use digital traces from both Twitter and Google Trends, toxicity and sentiment classifiers trained for the Portuguese language, and an annotated corpus of SGBR's tweets. Our key findings were threefold. First, we found that SGBR's requests to companies were largely successful (with 83.85% of all 192 targeted companies responding positively) and that user pressure was correlated to the speed of companies' responses. Second, there were no significant changes in the online attention and the user engagement going towards the targeted media outlets in the six months that followed SGBR's campaign (as measured by Google Trends and Twitter engagement). Third, we observed that user interactions with companies changed only transiently, even if the companies did not respond to SGBR's request. Overall, our results paint a nuanced portrait of internet activism. On the one hand, they suggest that SGBR was successful in getting companies to boycott specific media outlets, which may have harmed their advertisement revenue stream. On the other hand, they also suggest that the activist movement did not impact the online popularity of these media outlets nor the online image of companies that did not respond positively to its requests.

  • Details
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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3501247.3531563
Web of Science ID

WOS:001118952600009

Author(s)
Ribeiro, Barbara Gomes
Ribeiro, Manoel Horta  
Almeida, Virgilio
Meira, Wagner, Jr.
Corporate authors
ACM
Date Issued

2022-01-01

Publisher

New York

Publisher place

Assoc Computing Machinery

Published in
Proceedings Of The 14Th Acm Web Science Conference, Websci 2022
ISBN of the book

978-1-4503-9191-7

Start page

87

End page

97

Subjects

Technology

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Sleeping Giants

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Online Activism

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Observational Studies

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DLAB  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
14th ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci)

Barcelona, SPAIN

JUN 26-29, 2022

FunderGrant Number

CNPq

CAPES

FAPEMIG

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Available on Infoscience
February 23, 2024
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/205217
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