The inevitability of digital public space heteroregulation: Framing the Portuguese

Abstract

The expectations and behaviors transferred to digital environments harbor broader structures and historical processes that predate the establishment of digital culture itself. For this reason, the actions of individuals in the digital arena represent different forms of technology appropriation. Digital platforms are now recognized as utopian because they amplify new censorious mechanisms. On the one hand, hate speech and various forms of violence shape a new media system; on the other hand, they allow individuals and groups to attempt to condition and silence digital public spaces, especially the female universe. Journalistic activity has always been recognized as an ethical and deontological duty to combat censorship. Based on semi-structured indepth interviews with 31 Portuguese women journalists, this research aims to identify the follow-up of Portuguese media to the successive decadent transformations of digital culture. Using the descriptive approach of thematic analysis, the results expose the inoperability of self-regulation of media and journalists. The bias of traditional values of denunciation is developed in internal rhetoric of violence normalization suffered by journalists, the subsequent disregard of audience participation and the practice of some censorship practices in journalistic contents. This scenario has potentiated the invasive temptations of heteroregulation by the political power, delegating to a public institution the competences for determining which digital contents are worthy of “sanctioning regimes”.