‘Keeping their shift together’: An exploratory visual analysis of a Brazilian crowd crime

Abstract

This study employs the identity shift theory to qualitatively analyse videos produced and published on social media by the invaders of the Brasilia governmental buildings on 8 January 2023. These videos were captured and shared by a Brazilian fact-checking agency (Lupa). Brazilian law classifies multitudinous crime, or crowd crime, as any crime committed by a group of people in a tumultuous situation, in which there is an identity shift from the self to the crowd. Employing nonverbal communication (NVC), including Ekman’s facial action coding system (FACS), the analysis of the videos identified ten large codes associated with emotions, which correspond to the stages of the attack. Results show that the crowd exhibited an identity shift through homogenous NVC from the beginning to the end of the process.