The Syntax of Violence: When Data Becomes Propaganda
A data analysis of nearly 300,000 social media posts reveals how right-wing narratives drowned out outrage over one of Rio de Janeiro’s deadliest police operations.
The massacre in Complexo da Penha wasn’t just fought with rifles — it was fought with hashtags.
Between 15:00 on October 28 and 11:00 on October 29, the internet recorded 289,034 mentions of the Rio police operation across Instagram, X, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. Within hours, the narrative war was settled: the far right dominated the debate by a factor of five.
According to data analyst Renato Dolci, who processed the posts using BrandWatch and FanPage Karma, 62% of all content was favorable to the operation. These were the “heroic BOPE” and “historic cleanup” posts — clips of armed officers hailed as saviors, comments calling the raid a “necessary war against narco-terrorism,” and praise for Governor Cláudio Castro. The dominant framing reduced the death toll to “four fallen policemen.”
Only 32% of mentions were critical, describing the event as a chacina — a massacre — or genocide of the poor. These posts echoed reports of 120+ deaths, many of them unarmed residents, and accused the state of executing a racist extermination in the favelas. A remaining 6% expressed fear or confusion, typified by messages like “Rio turned into Gaza — stay home, God protect us.”
Engagement gap: five to one
Dolci’s breakdown shows just how asymmetric Brazil’s digital ecosystem has become. Right-wing accounts such as @claudiocastroRJ (100 k likes) or @nikolasferreira (80 k) vastly outperformed left-leaning voices like @southaferreira (50 k) and @taliriapetrone (21 k).
The result: five times more engagement for pro-operation narratives.
Instagram led the conversation with 83,820 mentions (29%), followed by X (24%), YouTube (19%), TikTok (17%), and Facebook (11%). Across all platforms, patriotic slogans, uniformed imagery, and short emotional captions consistently outperformed longer or fact-based critiques.
The algorithm of order
What emerges is a digital echo chamber where state violence is aestheticized and outrage is algorithmically punished. The platforms’ emotional reward systems — shares, likes, fast visuals — amplify moral simplicity: the “war on drugs” becomes a heroic spectacle, and systemic racism becomes invisible under a flood of emojis. Each “faxina histórica” post does the political work of a press release — for free.
The operation’s aftermath online shows how Brazil’s far right doesn’t need to control media outlets anymore; it only needs to feed the machine content that feels like victory. In this war, data replaces ideology, and algorithms decide who gets to define reality.
