Workshop: Digital Literacies and Digital Inclusion in Contemporary Brazil

This paper discusses hashtags use during a food delivery strike organised through Twitter on July 1st 2020, in Brazil. The movement aimed at exposing the poor working conditions of delivering professionals working for Brazilian online food ordering and delivery platforms. This movement tried to engage the general public by asking users not to order from any food/delivery platform for 24 hours. The engagement of customers and the rising of their awareness was expected to bring financial losses and make such platforms/apps both recognise motoboys’ (Brazilian Portuguese for motorcycle courier) labour rights and offer them better sanitary conditions, fundamentally because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The hashtag #grevedosapss (#applicationstrike or #appstrike) identified the movement-related Twitter messages. The methods rely on a mixed-methods approach (Johnson, Onwuegbuzie, and Turner 2007) as it integrates both quantitative and qualitative data analysis within the same investigation. Data scrapping relied on R language programming tools (Kearney 2019; R Core Team 2021) and visual representation on free network plotting software (Bastian, Heymann, and Jacomy 2009). After scraping 279280 tweets (including retweets and mentions), the 100 more frequent hashtags were manually classified according to their function in the field of discourse (Halliday 1978) and their co-occurrence plotted in a network graph. The hashtags are used not simply to index the tweets; they also have discursive meaning.