I’m a criminal — and if you retweet me you are one too.

How Brazil is slowly crawling back to its dark dictatorship years.

In the past few months Brazil has seen a wave of protests, initially triggered by a raise on São Paulo bus fares, gaining momentum — and an equal wave of politically-motivated police violence. While protests are gaining increasing exposure in the media, this exposure has been mostly negative, with media outlets openly manipulating information in order to support state violence. Protesters are described as “vandals” without reason or goal; increasingly violent police action is justified by headlines describing how these “vandals” have broken shop windows.

The past two weeks have been especially turbulent in my hometown of Rio de Janeiro, one of the host cities for next year’s World Cup. Public school teachers in Rio have been on strike for better working conditions and payment for over two months. This (deeply biased) article published by The Guardian describes one teacher’s situation on the 8th of October protests:

“Among the protesters was Gisela Ferreira, who earns 1,000 reais (£280) for a 64-hour month of teaching in a secondary school in Paraty”

The Military Police of the State of Rio de Janeiro responded the protests with an astounding outpour of violence and arbitrary arrests. Social media outlets exploded with posts showing support to the striking teachers.

Three days ago, on the 15th of October, state violence against protesters turned especially gruesome. The 15th of October marks the national Teachers Appreciation Day; as such, another protest was scheduled for the day and largely coordinated and advertised on social media. The protesting crowds included not only teachers, but also other citizens who were there to show their support for a just cause.

Ever since protests began in last June, Police all over the country has been known to deny medical care to the injured, to attack lawyers and journalists who offer legal support and video documentation to unjustly arrested protesters and to try to prevent protesters from documenting the violence by taking their phones and cameras away. A Rio policeman posted on his Facebook profile a photo of his broken truncheon with the caption “Sorry, teacher”. A woman was arrested for responding verbally to sexual harassment by a military police officer. This video, recorded on the 15th of October protests, clearly shows a policeman picking up a stone and planting it on a protester’s backpack in order to arrest him for carrying a weapon (a stone? Really?). Even German media picked up the story on the unbearable situation of police violence in Brazil, describing the police as “worse than gangs”. Obviously, the actions of the Military Police are coordinated under direct orders from Governor Sérgio Cabral, Mayor Eduardo Paes, Chief Security Secretary José Mariano Beltrame and Civil Police Chief Martha Rocha.

Official Military Police estimates from the 15th of October protests say that 64 adults and 20 minors were arrested, 70 of them held without bail due to being accused of “forming criminal organisations” under a new, hastily-passed law that redefines what a “criminal organisation” might be. The Order of Attorneys of Brazil, which has been closely following protests and offering free legal counselling to arrested protesters, estimates that 208 people were arrested. Leaders and organisers were heavily targeted, being sent directly to prison; next day headlines on newspapers described these political prisoners as “vandals”.

Today, a new development in an already absurd situation happened: O Globo, Rio’s most-read newspaper, published an article describing how, according to Chief Police Officer for Cybercrimes in Rio Gilson Perdigão, people who “support acts of vandalism and violence through comments or photos are committing a crime”.

I’ll let that piece of information sink in for a few seconds.

Yes, by showing support for protesters, I, as a brazilian citizen, can be criminally prosecuted. My tweets and Facebook posts are criminal, and everyone who retweets, shares, comments or likes my posts can also be considered a criminal. According to Perdigão’s comment, I could go to jail and/or lose the PhD scholarship that supports me as a researcher based in Berlin just for writing this text. So I’ll leave my opinion here in very clear words:

I support the protests. I support activist organisations like the Black Blocs, who had the guts to actually protect teachers against police violence. I support every single person who talks back, who reacts to state violence, to dictatorship and to censorship. I support resistance groups against the dictatorial government of Sérgio Cabral and Eduardo Paes, respectively Governor and Mayor of Rio de Janeiro.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about how Perdigão’s declaration might affect how we use social media. Theoretically, social media services offer all of us a certain degree of protection: we can make certain posts or even entire accounts private, we can send private messages and we can keep our subversive ideas within safe spaces. That is, of course, a supremely naive perspective: first of all because there are no safe spaces on the internet — and I suppose the NSA surveillance story took care of that illusion. Second, because isn’t the sharing of ideas and opinions, political or otherwise, the whole point of social media anyway? Wasn’t social media — and the internet, for that matter — supposed to be all about freedom of expression?

Obviously, Perdigão’s very clear threat will not cause all social media activity around the protests to suddenly cease; rather, it will probably inflame those who are already involved with the protests even further. I do worry, however, when will his threat become a reality (if it hasn’t already: the admins for the Black Bloc page on Facebook were framed and arrested in September). And I worry, considering that we are currently living in a surveillance state, what will this lead to.

Will we develop new media outlets or services in order to secure of rights?

Will we be able to resist state violence and censorship with the aid of technology?

Until the World Cup, who knows.