Research by , shows that a large portion of Brazilians , for fear of social, professional or legal retaliation.
According to the survey, 38.2% of Brazilians fail to express themselves in political conversations with their family at least once a month. For 20%, this happens frequently.
The survey interviewed 1,109 people between April 15 and 29, in person, with a margin of error of three percentage points.
On social media, 32.5% reported self-censorship at least once a month, 14.9% frequently.
Another data shows that a third of Brazilians report having felt afraid of being harmed or persecuted by authorities when expressing an opinion on a controversial subject. Of these, 15.3% say they feel this fear frequently.
When publicly criticizing politicians, public agents or government policies, 31.2% reported the same fear, with 15.4% feeling it frequently.
The trend is higher among Brazilians who identify more with the right, reaching 36.1% of respondents in this segment. The level is more than double that of those who identify with the left (17.4%) or the center (18.5%).
But it is the topic that most intimidates the debate, with 47.9% declaring themselves reluctant to discuss it.
Next come politics and elections (34.5%) and (34.1%) as the most sensitive topics. Hobbies and general preferences (78.7%) and freedom of expression (71.2%) are the topics that generate the least fear in the discussion.
For Fernanda Trompczynski, a Sivis researcher, “the hierarchy of discomfort revealed by the data is not random.”
According to her, themes that remain at the level of ideas, such as freedom of expression, provoke greater openness to dialogue, unlike more concrete points, such as the legalization of abortion.
“It is the data about elections that is most worrying. About 1 in 3 Brazilians declares reluctance to discuss politics and elections. A democracy is, or should be, based on friction between divergent perspectives. This retraction of debate is what the literature calls the spiral of silence: when people realize that their opinions are minority or frowned upon, they tend to remain silent”, he states.
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