Ada C. Machado da Silveira 68 from agents who saw the Internet as a favorable environment for their activist demands. Many examples of political demonstra- tions in the past 30 years have relied on applications stemming from the proliferation of communication technologies and the use, especially, of smartphones (Chirstensen; Groshek, 2020). The proclaimed importance of news activity for democ- racy in Western societies leads to conjectures about the impact of the power system on this activity. The acknowledged autoc- racies would be responsible for restrictions on freedom of the press, the curtailment of journalistic activity, the establishment of censorship mechanisms, and, especially, the fragile issue of the safety of journalists. The aforementioned visions of the exercise of political power with regard to the news instance can be confronted in terms of the political spectrum. Stier (2015) worked on a clas- sification between democratic and autocratic societies intending to study press freedom (or media freedom). His empirical analysis led him to characterize subtypes of autocratic regimes in a wide variety which encompasses, in addition to communist ideocracies, electoral autocracies, monarchies, and military re- gimes. He points to a complex vision regarding restrictive poli- cies and impacts on the media. From another perspective, security policies and the degradation of democracy, as analyzed by Brito et al. (2022), in a study published by the Center for the Analysis of Freedom and Authoritarianism (LAUT), pair Brazil with other autocratic soci- eties. The contexts of autocratization are marked by specific re- strictions on media access and, when mentioning the report for 2021, the V-Dem Institute considered Brazil to be one of the five global leaders in autocratization, along with India, Turkey, Hun- gary, and Poland. Brito et al. (2022) highlight the monitoring conducted by Freedom House (2022), which recorded a sharp decline in the area of civil liberties, with a reduction in academic and expression freedom, in addition to the increase of economic inequality, the growing fear of expression on sensitive issues, like gender and sexuality which are target of virtual persecution and lynch T in h g e . y note, on the one hand, the implementation of various surveillance mechanisms, a strategy that involves four
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