When Democracy Breaks: A Critical Media Psychology Analysis of January 6 and January 8
@jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia
Two acts of political violence. Two of the world's largest democracies. Two years and two days apart. On January 6, 2021, supporters of Donald Trump stormed the United States Capitol. On January 8, 2023, supporters of Jair Bolsonaro stormed the Presidential Palace, the National Congress, and the Supreme Federal Court in Brasília — simultaneously, and live on social media.
These were not coincidences of the calendar. A new paper from EMPOWERVERSE titled Democratic Rupture and Media Psychology: A Critical Comparative Analysis of the January 6, 2021 US Capitol Insurrection and the January 8, 2023 Brazilian Federal Buildings Attack, argues that they were locally embedded expressions of the same structural moment: one in which social media affordances, political disinformation, and authoritarian populist leadership converge to make anti-democratic collective violence not just possible, but psychologically foreseeable.
"Democracy does not fail through sudden collapse. It erodes through the gradual degradation of the shared epistemic and moral foundations that make democratic participation possible. January 6 and January 8 were not isolated endpoints. They were, in all probability, chapters in a continuing and transnational story."
Oliveira, J. (2026). Democratic Rupture and Media Psychology. doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.31050.73926
Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Critical Media Psychology, the paper examines the psychological, communicative, and structural conditions associated with both events, asking not simply what happened, but how ordinary citizens were transformed into participants in attacks on constitutional democracy.
Why this analysis matters right now:
✓ Far-right movements are globally connected: what happened in Washington and Brasília may not be independent events
✓ Platform design actively shapes political violence: this is a structural problem, not an individual one
✓ Disinformation does not merely spread false facts: it constructs complete alternative realities with their own moral logic
✓ Media literacy is a democratic survival skill: and most citizens have never been taught it
Al Jazeera People & Power (2024): How Social Media Helped Fuel the 2024 UK Riots. The same dynamics documented in the paper (social media amplification, moral disengagement, networked incitement) visible in real time in a European democracy.
The psychology of ordinary people doing extraordinary harm
One of the paper's most important contributions is its analysis of moral disengagement, Albert Bandura's framework for understanding how individuals can selectively suspend their own moral self-regulatory standards to engage in conduct they would otherwise prohibit. Both insurrections relied on at least four of Bandura's identified mechanisms.
Moral justification reframed violence as defence: participants in both events described their actions as protecting democracy from an illegitimate seizure of power. The subjective experience of the act shifted from aggression to necessity. Euphemistic labelling ran alongside it: "protest," "demonstration," "marching" — language that allowed self-approval to coexist with destructive conduct. Dehumanisation was structurally produced by years of media framing that portrayed political opponents as existential threats, creating discursive conditions in which violence could feel righteous. And diffusion of responsibility was built into the crowd itself: research documents that some January 6 participants later described having been swept along by momentum, consistent with classic findings on deindividuation and group dynamics.
These were the predictable outputs of information environments specifically engineered to produce them.
Disinformation as alternative reality, not just false information
The paper applies Critical Discourse Analysis to both movements' communications and finds a consistent deep structure. The Stop the Steal narrative in the United States and the election fraud narrative in Brazil were not simply false claims. They were fully elaborated counter-narratives with their own epistemologies: internal logic, emotional resonance, moral hierarchy, and an explanation of why the mainstream account was itself a lie.
This is why fact-checking was structurally insufficient as a response. When a disinformation ecosystem explains in advance why fact-checkers are corrupt agents of the opposition, providing correct information does not penetrate the counter-narrative. It becomes evidence of the conspiracy it describes. In Brazil, the evangelical dimension added a transcendent layer: to question the election fraud claim was, for many believers, to take the side of moral evil itself. Analysis of over 15,000 WhatsApp groups found that religion was among the central topics animating Bolsonaro supporters in the lead-up to January 8.
The two movements also differed in critical ways. January 6 was incubated primarily on open, visible social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, where content accumulation was at least theoretically observable. January 8 was incubated primarily on encrypted, closed platforms: WhatsApp and Telegram, whose architecture made monitoring and intervention structurally far more difficult. Research documented that participants used Telegram channels to exchange transport information and code phrases to avoid detection. This divergence has major consequences for how platform governance must evolve if democratic institutions are to be protected.
Authoritarian learning: connected or coincidental?
One of the paper's most consequential (and carefully hedged) arguments concerns the possibility of authoritarian learning: the proposition, advanced by political scientist Brian Klaas (2023), that contemporary far-right movements share tactics, rhetoric, and inspiration through transnational networks, adapting what they observe. The documented personal and political ties between Trump and Bolsonaro, the acknowledged links between their digital infrastructures, and the structural evolution of January 8 are all consistent with this argument.
The paper treats this as a scholarly argument worth taking seriously, not as an established fact. The same structural similarities could arise from parallel domestic conditions rather than deliberate adaptation. What the evidence does support confidently is that neither event is adequately understood as a purely domestic development — a research agenda treating each national case in isolation will systematically miss dynamics that matter for prevention.
Researcher Leticia Cesarino's observation that January 8 can be traced to 2018, when Bolsonaro was elected through a campaign built substantially on social media disinformation, is important here. Any account of January 8 that begins with January 6 has started too late. The conditions that produce democratic rupture are not created in the weeks before an event. They are created across years of sustained exposure to disinformation ecosystems, declining institutional trust, and the systematic psychological preparation of a population to accept violence as patriotic necessity.
What this means for all of us
The paper concludes with three broad implications. First, political violence of this kind is not reducible to individual psychological failure. The participants were not uniquely susceptible extremists. Many were ordinary citizens embedded in information environments that appear to have been structurally productive of the beliefs and emotions that made collective violence feel righteous. This shifts attention from individual-level intervention toward structural response: platform regulation, media literacy education, and political accountability for leaders who manufacture disinformation.
Second, the transnational dimension of these events demands a transnational analytical and policy response. Cooperative international research and cooperative platform governance are not optional extras. They are structurally necessary if the phenomenon is to be understood and resisted.
Third, both events illustrate the psychological cost of declining institutional trust. The erosion of shared epistemic foundations (the shared facts and information sources that democratic life requires) creates conditions in which disinformation ecosystems can expand into the vacuum. Media literacy education is necessary but insufficient on its own. It must be accompanied by platform accountability, support for quality journalism, and the active cultivation of the institutional trust that democracies depend on.
The words used to describe an event are never neutral. The framing of January 6 and January 8 as protest or insurrection, as isolated failure or systemic warning, is itself a discursive act with consequences for what gets done about it. This paper is a contribution to getting that framing right.
📖 Read the full paper
Oliveira, J. (2026). Democratic Rupture and Media Psychology: A Critical Comparative Analysis of the January 6, 2021 US Capitol Insurrection and the January 8, 2023 Brazilian Federal Buildings Attack. EMPOWERVERSE Centre for Critical Media Psychology
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