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Paper short abstract

When can amateur journalists be said to be practicing citizen media and when are they disseminating fake news? Drawing on ethnography of progressive and conservative protests in Brazil, I explore how protesters bricolage ‘truth’ from mass media fragments to assert competing visions of democracy.

Paper long abstract

In 2013, a series of progressive protests against police brutality broke out throughout Brazil. While mass media coverage was limited, the popular coverage of the protests was made by amateur journalists and celebrated as ‘citizen media.’ A decade later, in 2023, conservative protests against an alleged electoral fraud emerged. Mass media underplayed the demonstrations again, and protesters produced content that was quickly labelled ‘fake news.’ This paper asks: what epistemic practices unite these apparently opposed grassroots content creation initiatives?

Drawing on digital ethnography in Brasília and Rio de Janeiro around these two waves of protests, I analyse both movements as instances of bricolage, through which ordinary citizens use social media to creatively reassemble bits and pieces of information – including short videos, statistics, historical references and personal testimonies – to construct anti-mainstream assertions of what ‘democracy’ and ‘truth’ are. I argue that both fake news and citizen media draw on similar rhetorical resources: celebrations of free speech, empowerment of ordinary citizens as content producers and appeals to direct democracy over institutional accountability.

These cases epitomise how bricolage operates as an epistemic craft in polarised contexts. The same techniques that enable marginalised voices to challenge elite narratives also allow reactionary groups to undermine institutional knowledge. Rather than dismiss one as authentic and the other as deceptive, I examine how both engage in systematic organisation of available information to exert agency over political reality. The paper concludes by asking: what happens when competing bricoleurs work with overlapping materials to construct incommensurable truths?