Entre a rua e a rede: percepções juvenis sobre as fake news em seus processos de formação e participação políticas

Abstract

This study seeks to present and analyze youth perceptions about fake news in their processes of political formation and participation. Without prejudice to quantitative data, the research has a qualitative and exploratory approach, based on a systematic literature review and field research, with “youth, fake news, political formation and political participation” as basic analytical categories. Regarding the development of the research in its empirical aspects, this took place in two stages that dialogue with each other: the first occurred with the application of a mixed online questionnaire in order to know the socioeconomic profile of the participants and get closer to their places of speech, whose questionnaire used the Likert scale. In the second stage, audio-recorded semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants through the virtual platform Google Meet. The research participants are young people aged between 18 and 29 years, whose delimitation of the number of participants took place through the sampling process by theoretical saturation and the first approximations with them through the data collection method: Bola de Neve Virtual. With regard to data processing, the research used content analysis based on the assumptions of Bardin (2016), assuming that content analysis provides the analyst with a methodological path to further deepen the process of reading, interpretation and inferences. Epistemologically, the research is woven in a cultural-historical perspective, in which youth is understood as a plural and historical category; fake news as false narratives that pretend to be real and manipulate reality; and politics, from the perspective of training and participation, is understood as a field of struggles, power relations, disputes and conflicts. In the investigative construction of this thesis, the term politics is used without labeling the discourse in left or right party political categories. In this sense, leaning on theoretical and empirical ideas and assumptions, the path to youth perceptions of fake news in their political training and participation processes is characterized by the discussion of issues that intersect the encounter between the youth theme, fake news, political formation and political participation, taking into account the possible influence that fake news can exert as elements that transit in the fields of political socialization and youth sociability. As a whole, the research results indicate the inexistence of publications that articulate youth, political formation, political participation and fake news. They point to the fact that youth identities and life projects have been reconfigured by societal processes and technicalities that produce other spaces for youth sociabilities and collective practices. It is noticed that youth political participation practices vary in their spatiality and temporality, from everyday politics to institutionalized politics. It is evident that young people's views on politics continue to be impacted by the existing political culture, mainly because of their references to institutionalized politics. On the one hand, there is disbelief of young people with the traditional format of doing politics in Brazil and, on the other hand, there is hope of young people in new forms of political participation. Thus, the debate on youth political training represents the expression of new social paradigms in the face of the working structure of the production and dissemination of fake news, since the processes of youth political training and participation have taken place in a terrain where the culture of disinformation it is a great threat to the oxygenation of democracy. The data show that young people, taking into account the presidential elections in Brazil in 2018 and the positions taken by President Jair Bolsonaro during the Covid-19 pandemic, believe that fake news has a worrying role in the decision-making and political choices of youth, which can influence everyday political practices.