O racismo algorítmico digital e o racismo estrutural nas postagens online tocantinenses no período de 2020 a 2025 e a educação antirracista

Abstract

This Master's dissertation in Education reflects on algorithmic racism and its reverberation in online posts, with the general objective of understanding digital algorithmic racism based on the discussion of structural racism in public physical life, through the discourses manifested in online posts on news websites, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) within the media context of Tocantins between 2020 and 2025. The investigation is guided by the following research question: how do algorithms used in digital platforms and decision-making systems reproduce practices of algorithmic racism? We adopted a qualitative research approach, inspired by ethnomethodology and critical ethnoresearch, combined with content analysis of a netnographic sample. The theoretical framework articulates concepts of artificial intelligence, cyberculture, structural racism, algorithmic racism, and digital colonialism, establishing dialogue with authors such as Pierre Lévy, Lúcia Santaella, Silvio Almeida, Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, and Tarcízio Silva. The netnography was conducted based on online posts on social networks and news portals from Tocantins, such as Gazeta do Cerrado, T1 Notícias, G1 Tocantins, Coletivo SOMOS Tocantins, and the Public Defender’s Office of the State, focusing on netnotexts that fix experiences and meanings about racial violence, LGBTphobia, territorial conflicts, and institutional actions to confront these issues. We conclude by indicating that algorithmic racism constitutes a development—or even a cross-cutting oppression—of structural racism, manifesting through selective invisibilization, the negative hypervisibility of Black bodies in contexts of violence, and the opacity of algorithmic systems, which makes auditing and accountability of racist digital devices difficult. The research highlights the importance of critical algorithmic literacy in the training of teachers at the university and students in schools, reaffirming anti-racist education as a strategic field for confronting racism: structural and algorithmic, produced by biological, conscious, emotional, intuitive, and creative "natural human intelligence" and by the "artificial intelligence" of machines programmed by humans, based on algorithms with nanometric processors, high-performance chips, large volumes of data, operating through statistical patterns and mathematical optimization, with the metric Trillion Operations Per Second, AI hardware processing through algorithm patterns.