Discursos punitivos em redes sociais: o >i<Facebook>/i< como meio de circulação da \'Fala do crime\' no Brasil

Abstract

This study aims to identify and analyze vocabularies, statements, and interactions between Brazilian internet users on the digital network Facebook to understand the production and circulation of discourses on punishment in a media environment with a very specific operating dynamic that it is internet and, more precisely, the social networks.Based on the analysis of a specific case, the Ricoy Supermarket one, where a black teenager was tied up and whipped by the establishment's security guards, and also on a specific set of media, the Facebook page of the communication vehicles G1 and R7 that belong to two of the main media conglomerates in Brazil, the comments of internet users were analyzed using a combination of quantitative methods, using Natural Language Processing techniques, and qualitative methods, using Michel Foucault's perspective of discursive analysis. Through this methodological approach, it was possible to analyze the emergence of a discourse that forms subjects, objects, and strategies to deal with crime, criminality, and urban violencewhich had already been identified as 'talk of crime' at the end of the 1990's decade by Teresa Caldeira. The discursive discontinuity here is enabled by the internet specificities: the recording of speeches in a public environment, with the acceleration of exchanges and interactions and the elimination of geographic limitations. In addition, there is a strong presence of a neutral or non-punitivist counterdiscourse that directly confronts other perspectives on the criminal subject, the legitimacy of institutions and opens new perspectives on a democratic society and an universal vision of citizenship.