Nina Santos, 37, began paying attention to the digital revolution that was happening around her while still studying journalism at UFBA (Federal University of Bahia), in the mid-2000s. “I remember thinking: will there still be newsrooms for newspapers, magazines, TV, radio? It was a time of many transformations”, she says, who won the Democracy, information and freedom of expression category at .
The newspapers resisted, but the concern with the direction of the newspaper ended up taking Nina, who is the granddaughter of the newspaper, to another path within communication. First, he completed a master’s degree at his alma mater in Bahia, in which he set out to debate the power of citizens in a democracy within an online communication context. He defended his dissertation in 2012. The following year, what was largely stimulated by social networks — and documented through them.
“The beginning of the 2010s is very much marked by this idea that social media will absolutely democratize politics, that the costs of a political campaign will decrease absurdly, that all oppressed people will revolt against their oppressors and the revolution will be tweeted, and that the world will finally be democratic because everyone will have a voice”, he recalls.
The importance of social networks for politics and the streets became clear, and Nina embarked on a doctorate in 2015 at the Panthéon-Assas University, in Paris, to study how digital influences the mobilization of civil society. Back in Brazil in 2019, he decided it was time to apply the knowledge he acquired into practice.
By this time, the optimism of the beginning of the decade had already faded. “We are starting to move in the opposite direction, of absolute denial of the democratic capacity of these tools”, he says.
The journalist says that she believed it was possible to reach a middle ground and use social networks to achieve purposes such as reducing inequalities and combating misinformation, which was growing in leaps and bounds. It was with this intention that she created Desinformante, a project aimed at producing content about disinformation. In 2021, Aláfia Lab was also born, an initiative that aims to promote the use of technology to expand democracy and defend human rights.
In February 2025, Nina received an invitation to migrate again, this time to the heart of the federal government. She then took on the position of Deputy Secretary for Digital Policies at the Social Communication Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic. The journalist had already worked with the president from 2012 to 2015, when she was an employee at the Lula Institute and helped create the then-former president’s Facebook.
“The secretariat’s biggest challenge is to understand how the Brazilian State can, in the digital age, produce public policies to ensure that people have access to quality information to exercise their citizenship”, says Nina.
The work fronts, she says, are multiple. “We have a digital world, it is inevitable, but we need to have rules. What are these rules? How can these rules be negotiated? To what extent does the State define rules? To what extent do platforms define rules?”, he asks.
The regulatory issue is the most notable aspect of the Executive’s work in the field of social networks, as proposed this year by the Lula administration. Nina explains, however, that the work also covers educational and sustainability issues in journalism.
Decades after her first question about the survival of journalism in the face of the technological revolution, Nina says she works to allow this to happen. “When we talk about ensuring quality information, we are not just talking about combating problematic content, be it misinformation, fraud, scams, hate speech, we are also talking about occupying this digital space with quality information.”
When we talk about ensuring quality information, we are not just talking about combating problematic content, be it misinformation, fraud, scams, hate speech, we are also talking about occupying this digital space with quality information
Among the initiatives in the area, the deputy secretary cites an incubator for black and peripheral journalism projects, in partnership with the Ministry of Racial Equality, and a discussion currently underway in the National Congress to institute the payment of copyrights to media outlets whose content is used to feed artificial intelligence tools.
“I think we are now in a time of building solutions and new imaginaries”, says NIna, being optimistic about the future of technologies.
