O X EM QUESTÃO: SENTIDOS DE LIBERDADE DE EXPRESSÃO EM DISPUTA NO DISCURSO DIGITAL

Abstract

This dissertation aims to understand the functioning of the discourse on freedom of expression on X (formerly Twitter), taking as its starting point the blocking of the platform in Brazil as a discursive event (Pêcheux, 2015). Situated within the field of Materialist Discourse Analysis, this research is grounded in the understanding that meaning is not confined to the interior of the linguistic sign, as if it were transparently accessible to subjects. Rather, it is the opacity of language, its failures, that inscribes equivocation, allowing meaning to be produced differently. From this perspective, freedom of speech is understood as having no fixed or stable meaning; its effects of meaning result from socio-historical and ideological processes that, under the production conditions imposed by the digital environment, place it within different regions of meaning. The digital space is thus conceived as a distinct space for language practices, shaped by visibility regimes and traversed by other institutions, whose functioning is driven by circulation (Dias, 2018). For our analytical gesture, we take the meme as a signifying materiality (Lagazzi, 2009), tensioned at the symbolic and the political intersection, mobilizing different effects of meaning through its affiliation with different regions of the memory and marking the dispute over meaning surrounding the word. The research corpus consists of memes and comments available on Elon Musk’s profile on X, collected between April and October 2024, encompassing moments both prior to and following the blocking of the platform in Brazil. To this end, we mobilize the concepts of interdiscourse, preconstructed meaning, discursive memory, digital memory, and discursive formation, among others, to compose the theoretical–methodological–analytical apparatus that, through the multiplicity of language, enables us to understand the discursive processes that affect the production of meaning in the digital materiality under analysis. This study thus points to the constitution of freedom as a symbolic object in a dispute permanently traversed by the political, whose functioning renders visible the ideological tensions that organize reading and visibility regimes in the digital space.