=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=MarcoCivil:
Visualizing the Civil Rights Framework for the Internet in Brazil
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1210/datawiz2014_10.pdf
|volume=Vol-1210
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ht/RegattieriMGH14
}}
==MarcoCivil:
Visualizing the Civil Rights Framework for the Internet in Brazil==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1210/datawiz2014_10.pdf
MarcoCivil: Visualizing the Civil Rights Framework for the
Internet in Brazil
Lorena Lucas Regattieri Fabio Malini Fabio Goveia
LABIC-UFES LABIC-UFES LABIC-UFES
regattie@ualberta.ca fabiomalini@gmail.com fabiogv@gmail.com
Gabriel Herkenhoff
Labic-UFES
gabriel.herkenhoff@gmail.com
ABSTRACT Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, journalism, data mining,
In this paper, we map the controversy surrounding the Marco social network analysis, complex networks.
Civil da Internet (Civil Framework for the Internet) in Brazil.
Drawing on a Twitter dataset spanning from August 2012 to 1. INTRODUCTION
December 2013, this study uses a series of methods of data After an intense debate in 2007-08, the Office of Legislative
mining, processing, and information visualization to produce a Affairs of the Ministry of Justice, in partnership with the School
historiography of collective actions related to the Marco Civil. of Law in Rio de Janeiro at the Getulio Vargas Foundation
The MarcoCivil platform at the “Digital Culture” website creaed (FGV), initiated the collaborative construction of the proposal for
initiatives to spread the discussions online: a Twitter profile a civil law framework for the Internet in October of 2009. The
@MarcoCivil (run by the administrators of the platform) and the goal was to create legislation that defined "the legal responsibility
MarcoCivil hashtag. To conduct the Marco Civil cartography we for providers and users for the content posted on the
chose to work with the messages indexed to the MarcoCivil Internet…[and identified] measures to preserve and regulate the
hashtag circulating on Twitter. In 2012 and 2013 Twitter became fundamental rights of Internet users, such as freedom of
the online space in which cyber activists were most vocal. From expression and privacy".1
October 2012 to January 2013 , we collected about 21.997 tweets
related to Marco Civil, it was then that we noticed the presence of The Civil Rights Framework for the Internet in Brazil opposes the
a controversy and a diversity of points of view in dispute. News tendency to establish restrictions, convictions or bans on the use
reports in Brazilian newspapers during the discussion, little took of the internet. The framework intended to determine clearly the
into consideration the issues engendered in the struggle for rights and responsibilities regarding the use of digital media. The
approval of the law. By demonstrating with graphs the dispute focus, therefore, is the establishment of a legislation ensuring
between the different actors involved in this battle, we seek to rights, not a rule restricting freedoms. Between November 2009
contribute to the history of the approval of the Marco Civil. From and June 2010, the Marco Civil was developed through a uniquely
telecommunications companies to politicians, our report show open public process that allowed all Brazilian Internet users an
how history was made in the field of the internet human rights. opportunity to comment on its text. In the spirit of the bill’s
substance, civil society was empowered to collaborate with
policymakers in order to make the bill reflective of public interest
Categories and Subject Descriptors and prioties.
D.3.3 [Programming Languages]: Language Constructs and
Features – abstract data types, polymorphism, control structures. An initial draft drawn by legislators was posted Cultural Digital,
an open platform where the public could submit and review
K.4.1 [Computer and Society]: Public Policy Issues – Ethics, suggested changes to the bill. Throughout an open debate, Marco
Intellectual property rights, privacy, regulation. Civil received over two thousand comments from academics, civil
G.2.2 [Numerical Anlaysis]: Graph Theory - Graph algorithms. society organizations, technical experts, and private individuals.
Network problems. In 2011, the Marco Civil was submitted to Congress as Executive
Bill 2126 and was given priority on the legislative agenda. Since
then, the bill has become the subject of numerous controversies in
General Terms the House of Representatives due to inflammatory issues such as
Algorithms, Management, Measurement, Documentation, network neutrality, privacy, freedom of expression, and copyright.
Performance, Design, Reliability, Experimentation, Human The Bill has made it onto the agenda of the House of
Factors, Languages, Theory, Legal Aspects, Verification.
1 An English version of the bill is available at FGV
Keywords
http://direitorio.fgv.br/sites/direitorio.fgv.br/files/Marco%20Civ
il%20-%20English%20Version%20sept2011.pdf
Representatives eight times, but each time the vote has been ● Map the network of controversies on the #MarcoCivil;
postponed due to the lack of agreement among Members about
● Perform a semantic analysis of the expressions, hashtags, and
crucial points in the Marco Civil.
controversial issues that circulated on Twitter under the
Challenges in reaching an agreement have created an obstacle to #MarcoCivil hashtag.
the consolidation of a national-level regulatory framework for the
We centered our analyses around two distinct periods:
Internet. Among other things, this immobility reveals a tension
between the interests of businesses and the demands of civil ● July - December 2012: The Marco Civil bill enters the agenda
society. Over the course of the bill’s legislative history, the of the House of Representatives
telecommunications lobby and content industries have been the
driving force behind significant changes to the text. During this ● July - December 2013: Discussions about the bill resume at the
period, we have also witnessed a somewhat "schizophrenic" House of Representatives.
dynamic take hold of policymaking efforts concerning the In our network visualization, we chose to plot the network of
Internet. While the Ministry of Justice created an innovative retweets (RTs) that included the #MarcoCivil hashtag. Since RTs
collaborative platform so that civil society could participate in the must be replicated by many individuals, RTs on Twitter indicate
production of "The Bill of Rights for the Internet,” it also saw that a subject (represented by a hashtag) carried significant social
broad mobilization around a bill that sought to combat all forms relevance. We extracted data directly from the Twitter API, which
of crime on the Internet, especially financial crimes. Meanwhile, allowed us to capture and store about 20,000 tweets produced by
the Parliament endeavored to focus on criminal laws as a almost 10,000 profiles monitored in 2012.
foundational aspect of Internet regulation in the country.
For each tweet, we were able to log the tweet text, date, origin and
This strange situation persists today, as the copyright and destination of the tweet. The subsequent step after mining and
telecommunications industries oppose free “peer to peer” processing is the data is the visualization of data. Using the open
exchange and net neutrality. This can be explained, in part, by the source tool Gephi2, we sliced the data using different metrics,
interests of public security forces, which after public protests in creating new graph visualizations for each metric. To support our
June 2013 (strongly articulated by the civil society through social semantic analysis of the data, we analyzed 5137 tweets to identify
networks) advocated establishing a longer required period for the the political position of each actor in the debate on #MarcoCivil;
retention of private communications data that could support the the way Twitter profiles were expressing themselves in the
investigation of crimes and "deviations". The situation was network; the intention of the message; the themes it touched upon;
compounded in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks revealing and the controversy.
the National Security Agency (NSA) spying other countries
through PRISM. This struck a chord for Brazilian President The second procedure was to analyze all the tweets, 21,000 in
Dilma Roussef, who subsequent to the leaks, proposed an 2012 and 110,000 in 2013. For this, we used a data-mining tool
amendment to the Marco Civil that would force foreign called NAR_T3, a python script developed within the Laboratory
companies to host data on national servers. The proposal has of Studies on Image and Cyberculture (LABIC). The script
proved highly controversial, due both, to the geopolitical provides the following outputs:
implications it would carry and the technical complications it • Most repeated words and hashtags.
could introduce.
• Most replicated tweets.
Within the approaval of the Marco Civil, the world turns the eyes
to Brazil when it comes to Internet civil rights. The world • Word clouds and hashtags.
celebrated the bill at the NETmundial – Global Multistakeholder
• Co-occurring hashtags network.
Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance and at Arena
Participative. At the Arena, we had the presence of important • Most mentioned users.
people discussing internet and human rights, such as Roy
Singham (ThoughWorks), Julian Assange (Wikileaks) from the • Number of tweets per user.
Ecuador Embassy, and Frank La Rue (ONU). The event that • Number of active users per day
brought together representatives of governments and civil society
in search of a letter of international principles for the Internet was After generating groups with Gephi, we extracted the profile
considered the beginning of the process to discuss the internet names that built up each cluster in the network. When we
policies in a global context. History was made, but it is crucial to processed the script with the "cluster_usernames" of each of the
understand the path to the approval of the Marco Civil in order to groups, we obtained the same outputs, but now we could analyze
comprehend the struggles involved in the fight for Internet human them by targeted group. This allowed us to investigate the unique
rights. positions surrounding the controversy of each of the groups
identified.
2. METHOD AND GOALS
Latour[1] and Venturini’s[2] mapping controversies technique is
successful method to trace digital data. It is broadly used in the
communications field to map the debates around a specific
object/event. This is the theoretical foundation guiding our 2 Gephi is an open-source software for visualizing and analyzing
research; we used the cartography method to support us in the large networks graphs. Available at: http://gephi.org
digging experience in the Twitter data. As an empirical template, 3 This script was created to parse tweets. It is available at
Twitter served us for the purpose of:
https://github.com/ufeslabic/parse-tweets
3. DISCUSSIONS volume of tweets eventually formed an interactive network with
different common points of view on distinct aspects of the law
3.1 General Observations of Marco Civil (Figure 2).
Network Dynamics
In August 2012, when the Marco Civil entered the voting agenda
at the House of Representatives, the politics of this power struggle
overflowed into the virtual universe, particularly on social
networks. This chart represents the high level of participation on
Twitter, especially, the days in which the bill was expected to be
voted at the House of Representatives.
Figure 3. High rate Hashtag use with the hashtag
#MarcoCivil.
Figure 1. Number of Tweets per day with the hashtag
#MarcoCivil on Twitter, from 21 August to 3 December 2012.
With the vote imminent, activists, parliamentarians, lawyers,
specialists, businessmen, intellectuals, artists, government
ministers and even President Dilma Rousseff used social networks
to produce a broad debate on the subject. The buzz over the
Marco Civil quickly became one of the longest standing
controversies in the recent history of Brazilian politics. The
increasing rate of publication of tweets directly correlates with
increased political debate around the subject. The closer the
House of Representatives was to voting on the legislation, the
more activity we saw on Twitter under the #MarcoCivil hashtag.
The representatives found themselves facing pressure from a Figure 4. Word frequency within tweets mentioning the
broad range of channels: social networks, emails, blogs, and hashtag #MarcoCivil
online media. Some party websites even underwent DDoS attacks. Frequent use of the terms "vote" (votação) (6652), "postpones"
Digital expression around the issue became a strategy for activists. (adia) (2065), "House"(câmara) (4941) and "bill of law" (projeto
In many ways, these tactics exposed many politicians to public de lei) (2616)" suggested high levels of expectation that the bill
judgment, affecting their image among voters. This strategy has would pass and a commitment, at least among a minority of users,
proven to be a key measure to the movements connected to the to monitoring the long and tiresome journey of Marco Civil in the
field of free culture and the most progressive deputies. Congress. The anxiety around the bill was highlighted by the
intense correlation of the hashtag #marcocivil with the
#MarcoCivilJá (#MarcoCivilNow). The word “neutrality” and the
#neutrality hashtag can be seen often in the dataset (Figure 3 and
4) suggesting it was the most commonly discussed subject in
interactions between members of Congress and users tweeting
about #MarcoCivil.
3.2 Marco Civil in 2013: the network is
polarized and the privacy debate gains
attention
In 2012, the difficult process in voting the bill 2126/2011, plus
the numerous delays and changes in the course of the project,
Figure 2. Number of unique users per day participating in the turned the social networks - notably Twitter - into a major
publication of tweets with the hashtag #MarcoCivil. platform for discussion about the Marco Civil. Activists, experts
and concerned individuals began to debate the issue, seeking to
defend their perspectives and understand the significance of the
From August to December 2012, heightened publicity around the bill for the future of the Internet in the country. But with the
bill generated the mobilization of 16,072 different profiles, 22651 failure to reach an agreement and the start of the municipal
tweets and 5640 retweets (Figure 2). A variety of profiles and the elections of 2012, the vote on the Marco Civil fell into oblivion,
eventually being suspended. In June of 2013, two critical events links between the actors in the network and illustrates a force of
affected the trajectory of the bill: Public uprisings throughout the attraction between them (a dynamic referred to as “gravity”.) As
country and the first of the Snowden leaks. Protests over transit an individual, typically (thought not always) shares ideas with
fare hikes, economic inequality and other “bread and butter” those, which he agrees, individuals with similar opinions share
issues peaked in June, with some protesters referencing the bill content with and from each other, creating groups, which we call
and making it part of their messaging, both on and offline. At the perspectives. There are four perspectives within the Marco Civil
same time, some activists began to argue against the creation of network:
the civil framework for the Internet, claiming that the Marco Civil
• The purple network: individuals in favor of voting on the law
was a ploy made by the government to restrict Internet freedom.
(46.55% of the total network)
This questioning came up in light of the numerous arrests of
Facebook page administrators from groups opposed to the •The red network: individuals contrary to voting the bill
government, in particular, Anonymous and Black Blocs [3]. Back (17.39%)
then, videos from Anonymous began circulating claiming that
Marco Civil was going to have the opposite effects: for them the • The green network: media outlets and profiles specialized in
intentions of Marco Civil were to control online content. Thus, a law and civil rights (20.56%)
trend of polarization emerged while some continued to promote • The yellow network: foreign organizations that generally
the bill, despite changes in the text that weakened user protections supported the proposal for a regulatory framework (4.1% of total)
in the face of copyright restrictions, others began voicing
opposition to the bill, arguing that it would lead to greater Internet
censorship. The perspective of media outlets came out exactly 4. CONCLUSIONS
between these two groups, as news feeds reflected the arguments Our study suggests that the free digital culture activists are the
of both sides. The emergence of groups that made radical critiques ones responsible for articulating the Marco Civil debates. Thus,
of the Marco Civil represented a fundamental shift in the debate social networks i.e. Twitter, prove to be a rich environment for the
on the subject. This change can be better understood when we open debate. This network has become a major strategy to
undertake a semantic analysis of the network formed by these pressure the Brazilian Congress. In our study, we employed
groups during this period of time. computer-assisted analysis through mining methods and data
visualization in order to investigate our hypothesis. The outputs
have proven that our hypothesis is correct, as our research
displays several indications pointing to the centrality of the
actions and pro-Marco Civil campaign coordinated by activists
from Brazil and around the world. The days before voting on the
Marco Civil by the House of Representatives were periods when
Twitter profiles became highly mobilized in order to debate and
press the Parliament on the approval (or not) of the Marco Civil.
This demonstrates that the community formed around the hashtags
remained attentive to the decision-making movement of Congress.
On the other hand, it demonstrates how politics is creating a
routine towards the emotional tone of networks, influenced by the
chaotic flow of public opinion on the Internet.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Funding for the project ‘Mapping Controversies on the Internet: a
scientific cooperation between researchers who analyze the
Figure 5. Network of profiles that participated in the debate relationship between Aesthetics, Power and Internet’ generously
on the Marco Civil from July to December 2013. In the supplied by National Council for Scientific and Technological
Spotlight, profiles whose messages were most popular in the Development (CNPq), National Academic Cooperation Program
network. (Procad), Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education
The graph in Figure (5) shows the relationship established Personnel (Capes), Foundation of the Ministry of Education
through retweets from profiles that between July 17 and (MEC). Our thanks to the team at the Laboratory of Studies in
December 31 that used the keyword "Marco Civil". To produce Image and Cyberculture (LABIC) for the continues support.
this visualization we processed the data with the high gravity scale
to bring closer together those actors who had more connections 6. REFERENCES
with the group to which they belong. After this first step, we [1] Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to
generated a statistic of modularity in order to visually emphasize Actor Network Theory. Oxford University Press. Oxford.
each perspective by assigning each a different color. We used the
[2] Venturini, T. 2010. Diving in magma: how to explore
metric of authority to give prominence to nodes that had both
controversies with actor-network theory. In Public
stronger and larger quantities of connections in the network, with
Understanding of Science 19 (2009): 1-16.
the goal of finding those individuals who had a higher indegree in
the Marco Civil controversy. All told, the final goal was to display [3] Passos, N. 2014. O Black Bloc e o papel das mídias sociais
those who received the highest number of RTs of other important nas manifestações brasileiras de 7 de setembro de 2013.
actors in the network. For these groups, sharing messages creates Unpublished.