Watching the 2016 Olympics on Brazil’s alternative media: From platform hijack to discourse autonomy

Alternative media, activism and ‘coverage’

Despite the limitations of this term (Downing, 2001: ix), defining the ‘alternative media’ as a network of small-scale outlets, not aligned with the leading media organisations is a path that many studies have adopted (Festa and Silva, 1986; Harcup, 2013; Kucinski, 1991; Peruzzo, 2013; Woitowicz, 2009). Aware of the prominence of this rich vocabulary, such as participatory, activist, community or citizens’ media (Peruzzo, 2009; Rodríguez, 2001), we chose, nonetheless, not to problematise these terms. In Brazil, alternative media has a historical meaning of counter-hegemonic, politicised press (Kucinski, 1991); in short, the image of ‘alternative’ is the one that continues to define a wide universe of blogs and social media (Mendonça and Ercan, 2015; Davis, 2015). Besides the inherent subjectivity, the term was useful to determine who are the producers that do not take part in the mainstream Olympics coverage.

Because we do not look at street-based forms of activism that could configure platform hijacking or the so-called ‘piggyjacking’, or at the appropriation of the Olympics’ media infrastructure, as it happened in China (Horne and Whannel, 2010; Yu, 2013), we elected ‘coverage’ as another kind of possible intervention that would lead readers or spectators to skip the Olympics. We propose seeing the ‘hijacking’ through the efficiency of the alternative coverage, as well as by use of references or appropriations which could influence the spectator’s perception of the whole event. McQuail (2010) defined ‘coverage’ as a factual narration based on events and facts, but which keeps nuances of subjectivity (p. 11). Mass media coverage would involve ‘disputing areas as producers and disseminators of meaning about the events and contexts of social life’ (McQuail, 2010: 11). In ‘Alternative Journalism’, Atton and Hamilton (2008) saw the non-professional coverage as carrying perspectives ‘from the periphery’ (p. 135). Alternative journalists ‘have little interest in balancing reporting’, as they do not hide their bias (Atton and Hamilton, 2008: 85).

‘Coverage’ will hence assist us in considering the act of reporting, posting and sharing information about the 2016 Olympics. We also acknowledge this form of reporting as an act of ‘demonstration’ towards the mainstream media (Cottle, 2008), but which, at the same time, could become a genuine intent to follow the schedule of the Olympics, or simulate the channels dedicated to its broadcast. It is clear that a convergence between both mainstream and alternative realms exists in these events (Marshall et al., 2010). Bailey (2009) cited, for example, the possibilities that lie in this ‘overlap’ with ‘citizen’ coverage, including that of exploring agendas unknown to the mainstream (p. 134). The 2013 demonstrations in Brazil had alternative media producers covering the protests beyond the frame of violence and police confrontation that appeared on TV (Peruzzo, 2013: 82; Pinto, 2013: 82; Holston, 2014). Indeed, we deepen in how this amalgamation could turn to hijack, in the context of unmaking such Olympic hegemony.

Media events, alternative frames and platforms

Dayan and Katz (1992) defined media events as mediated ceremonial rituals that interrupt not only the flow of broadcasting but also people’s routines. Media events convey a homogenised aesthetic of harmony among nations. These tactics would be their ‘base argument’ (Tomlinson, 2014) or ‘base narrative’, that is, to say there is the ‘Olympic movement’ or an ‘Olympic spirit’ are some of the examples thereof (Price, 2008b: 92–93). More pessimistically, media events could ‘manipulate’ the viewer’s perceptions (Rojek, 2013). To ‘hijack’, in this case, has meant the ‘sometimes forceful, but certainly involuntary or antagonistic, seizure of world attention by altering’ the base narratives (Price, 2008b: 86), which could also mean ‘diverting’ to opposite subjects (Couldry et al., 2009). We call such diversions or the new versions of the original facts as ‘counter-narratives’. On ‘performing media events’, Dayan and Katz (2009) exposed this dilemma between journalism and ‘witness’ accounts of the event as on opposite sides, meaning that ‘hijack’ would represent an irreversible break from journalism: ‘Once the commitment [to the event] is made, it is not easy to switch back again to journalism … In the face of media events, the journalistic paradigm of objectivity and neutrality is simply irrelevant’ (p. 92).

Many examples of the ‘hijacking’ of media event platforms stem from recent editions. The Olympics in Beijing saw attempts to trample on government censorship (Price and Dayan, 2009); in South Africa, the FIFA World Cup had people debating the regulation of sex work (Bonthuys, 2012); in London, the changed priorities of urban development due to the Olympics were frequently denounced (Roche, 2002); in Germany, the Olympics stirred discussion on immigration and integration (Stehle and Weber, 2013). From the long list of existing activist and mediatised disruptions (Boykoff, 2017), we also found alternative media examples, as the so-called ‘piggyjacking’ in China, when a group of producers has meant to create ‘nonaccredited media centres’, hacking into the International Olympics Committee’s (IOC) model and skipping the state ‘regulation’ of images (Miah et al., 2008: 325).

In Brazil, the existence of a similar model that could lead to the interruption or diversion from the main platform could exist, although through less obvious channels. First, there are fewer opportunities to hack into the mainstream media coverage of media events. Second, different from the Chinese regulation that attracted the ‘piggyjacking’, Brazil’s media producers seem less interested in ‘joining’ the IOC structure as on-site reporters. Third, the country’s well-known social issues might not be enough to entirely subsidise a ‘platform hijack’, as such stories did not echo during the event’s planning (Gaffney, 2016; Levy, 2017). Therefore, if the alternative media is expectedly to make use of social issues to tackle the Olympics’ ‘base arguments’, but not to the extent of blocking the interruption of ceremonies, what is the potential of hijacking it in the face of global media highlight? Activists in stadia may storm into official ceremonies, but is there space for a subtler and longer kind of platform hijacking? To what degree have assumptions such as the ‘witnessing’ of events and one of ‘journalism renunciation’ (Dayan and Katz, 1992) led scholars to assume that producers will hijack the event? To what degree are media events central to alternative media producers’ reporting at all?

To look at these questions, this article recovered Goffman’s ideas of seeing frames as the ‘organisation of experience’ (Goffman, 1974), which helped us to identify the forms of reading facts that occurred along with the Games. Our approach stemmed from successful experiences that have mapped media frames as a reflexivity tool, aimed at ‘selection, organisation, and presentation of information’ (Benford and Snow, 2000; Reese et al., 2001; Entman, 2007; Altheide and Schneider, 2012: 51) and the many creative ways of doing so (Deuze, 2006). Similar method has inspired other studies about blogs, for instance (Cooper, 2010). Here, we proposed looking beyond the mainstream media as the only possible Olympic ‘platforms’, stretching the possibilities of what ‘hijacking’ means by verifying it within the alternative media ‘coverage’. In sum, to restrict the notion of ‘hijacking’ to one of stealing media attention would equal and limit these purposes to that of achieving newsworthiness (Cottle, 2008) or “challenging the news” (Forde, 2011). This study’s approach thus invests in the possibility of ‘hijack’ as another possible effort by those producers who demonstrate a long-term engagement with their communities. Our sampling efforts and definition of alternative media have focused on this profile of media producer as opposed to considering activists as purposeless, rootless agents.

In this way, looking at ‘platform hijack’ consisted in verifying the extent to which this existing coverage has embedded, accommodated, or disrupted, to a greater or lesser extent, the news pieces and narratives related to the Olympics Games. In this way we checked (1) frames that synchronised and encompassed the event’s unfolding, (2) reproduced the same language as that of the event or its opposite and (3) ‘hijacked’ the event’s narratives or tweaked the original meaning of its celebrations or competitions. The confirmation of any of these hypotheses was understood as a form of hijack. And yet, we also coded the opposite in our analysis; no attempt to mention the Olympics or the continuation of local stories, we called it the non-hijack frame. In brief, we analysed the extent to which the use of language could demonstrate producers’ intent regarding the Olympics, whether to assume the role of the official narrator or to refuse such role.

A purposive sample (Bryman, 2012) allowed us to (1) select the alternative media groups that were resonant in the country; (2) those that had various degrees of alignment with professional journalism and (3) covered different locations. First, we chose the Agência Pública, the São Paulo-based group that rose to prominence thanks to a series of professionally written reportages (Carvalho, 2014). From the groups that are less aligned with professional journalism, the choice for Jornalistas Livres network has mirrored a significant sector in the Brazilian alternative media that support left-wing politics. Finally, we included Coletivo Papo Reto, a group of citizen journalists that covers the Alemão Favela, raising issues of police violence and discrimination.

Because Facebook is the standard platform of publication for all these outlets, we targeted their publications on this platform during the month of August 2016, limiting it to 60 posts (20 to each outlet, 5 per week of the Game). We sought to minimise the influence from Facebook’s algorithms by evading any automatic criterion to choose the articles. While the size of the sample may not reflect accurately the different routines of each outlet (some publish more, others less), it offers an appropriate breadth of coverage, at least enough to suit this study’s targeting of the Olympics. As our emphasis is not on each outlet’s affordability, but on the quality of their diversions or compliance with the Olympics agenda, the number of articles must not represent an issue as far as it is significant to capture most of their reports on the Olympics.

The analysis effort considers Van Gorp’s (2010) guidance about electing ‘frame devices’, which were the terms that were Olympics-related and otherwise, repeating the analysis with a second coder. The parts that were most relevant to illustrate the compliance with the ideas of ‘platform hijacking’, or otherwise ground the following discussion. We have translated these passages from Portuguese and interpreted producers’ stances by drawing on Wetherell & Potter (1987) idea of repertoire, which would constitute the expressions and mentions that indicate an intention towards a subject or agenda; in this case, how far or close producers were from appropriating the narration of the Olympics and promoting other usages of the event in their reporting. To illustrate their potential diversions, we collected examples from the leading news portal G1, targeting the same date and story. We also interpreted the results according to the existing literature on alternative media and media events, as we present it next according to the chronological unfolding of the Olympics.

Diverting from the Olympics

This research confirmed the prevalence of non-hijack frames with 86.7 per cent of the frames observed (n = 60). This result means that alternative media producers were not commenting or informing on the Olympics in most of the analysed occurrences. If we leverage slangs, expressions, jargons, irony as part of the reports, this content also does not amount to a ‘hijack’ as it did not mean to replace the ‘base narratives’. Yet, these language resources resembled a ‘counter-narrative’, but aimed at local audiences, then not as a replacement of the mainstream narrative. For example, the Coletivo Papo Reto used #Rio40chaos, an ironic adaptation of the Rio de Janeiro’s slogan Rio 40 degrees to mention the city’s unpreparedness for the event. The Jornalistas Livres group employed the hashtag #foratemer (or ‘Temer, out’), linking the coverage of the Olympics to the political crisis. Below we discuss the extent to which neologisms have borrowed on the Olympics, and formed a repertoire that reflected on the event’s political significance as opposed to attempting to seize the latter’s highlight.

An underlining aspect found in non-hijack frames was the continuation of previous agendas, traditionally focused on disadvantaged populations. This pattern continued throughout August. Unconcerned with the mainstream media Olympic programme, or with any of its repercussions at the local level, producers did say little about what was happening, and when they did say so, they kept returning to the costs and the efforts ‘imposed’ on the host country. As these examples extracted from the Agência Pública show, their proposal was to tell stories of marginalised populations in a series named ‘One Hundred Evictions’:

We are looking for stories on evictions that happened as result of the Olympics and which have not been told yet. We want to hear new voices! (Agência Pública 04 August 2016)

One hundred evictions: Our reporter Giulia Afiune tells the story of the babysitter Maria da Conceição Queiroz da Silva, who has lost her home and part of her history for the Olympics. (Agência Pública, 09 August 2016)

From all the media outlets included in this research, Agência Pública appeared as the most attained to a concrete expectation that they could make their public skip the Olympics diary in exchange of other ‘urgent’ concerns. On the Jornalistas Livres, otherwise, producers have prioritised unrelated stories, mostly about partisan politics. When mainstream media outlets focused on the first Olympic developments, the outlet’s page seemed to sensitise readers about the case of a leftist journalist who received insults during his coverage:

To criticise such cathartic moments is asking to burn at the social media stake: In his blog, Sakamoto – who likes sports, who does not have stray dog complex, who is not nostalgic _ confesses he is part of a group of people which, once watching the opening ceremony. [He] did not fall in tears, did not find it the prettiest thing in the world, did not felt proud for being Brazilian, and did not forget the issues at that moment, and was not overwhelmed by the Olympic spirit. (Jornalistas Livres, 06 August 2016)

By privileging personal aspects of this case, and his condition of a supporter of the left, this outlet reflected the ongoing political polarisation, because of which producers come to accuse society of being ‘anesthetised’, thus failing to react against the spending that stemmed from the Olympics Games:

Photographers, alongside Brazilian and international photography collectives, gathered in a joint project to narrate the Brazil of the 2016 Olympics. It is the other side of the tally: The first context of a country, which, anesthetised by the Games, does not perceive the attack from the right and from the extreme right, which promotes a coup d’état to finish with the dream of a fair society. The Real Game is an extension of the World Cup, Jogo Bonito and Off Side Brasil projects, which happened during the 2014 World Cup, and which also took place in Brazil. (Jornalistas Livres, 13 August 2016)

In fact, we cannot understand the alternative media coverage of the Olympics without stressing the weight of the political crisis. The preparations for the vote that would impeach President Dilma Rousseff have, furthermore, overshadowed any interest in engaging with any form of positive commentary on the event. However, the Olympics ended up coming as an opportunity to fight against the ‘anesthetised’ society, against which producers started to mention the possibility of covering the ‘Other Olympics’. While informative in its intent, the real wish of Jornalistas Livres was to fight the allegations of corruption that reached the left, trying to leverage the whole ‘corruption game’ as a broader web of power disputes in the Brazilian Congress.

Outlets have also altered the regular content of other kinds of news stories to highlight aspects of citizens’ lives, but not to embed it in the Olympics broadcasts. For example, producers reinforced that the local population lived amid violence and, therefore, it did not matter if the mainstream media insisted on the visitors’ safety and welfare. The main subject matter was Rio’s historically poor records on human rights in relation to what they perceived as escalating violence. Only in one case, producers used content from The Intercept website to voice the “citizens’” outrage. This content described the Olympics as a ‘party’ in which disadvantaged Brazilians did not participate. Different outlets, the favela-based and the journalism agency have argued against the subordination of the public life around the Olympics:

In this interview, the police chief denies that the population fears mega operations, as it was the case with the Germania Operation which brought 250 cops into the Complexo do Alemão in a morning of intense shooting. For him: That is the opposite, it brings up a sensation of security. ‘More security’ for whom, Mr Police chief? (Coletivo Papo Reto, 09 August 2016).

The BBC Brasil went through different points in Rio and talked to five Cariocas to identify some of the contrasts that illustrate the relationship between the mega event and the population. Regardless of definite opinions, they have a perception that the Games will be a party to which they do not feel invited. (Agência Pública, 05 August 2016)

Allegations against the luxury estates that were supposed to fulfil the Olympics venues linked these developments to the eviction of low-income households. The eviction agenda had producers using metaphors and slangs that suggested the Olympics as an oppressive event and a threatening factor, but which did not include storming into any of the Olympics venues, for example. As the event went on, other issues started to appear in producers reporting more clearly, as we discuss next.

Discussing repression, crime and social exclusion

As the event unfolded, producers’ repertoire started to address each of the impacts producers saw as deriving from the event. One of the strategies was to promote a narrative of ‘war against the people’. The main threat stemmed from the uncontrolled build-up of stadia and the imprisonment of the locals to ensure the safety of foreigners. These factors, overall, would fail at forging peace at home. For them, the Rio’s Military Police was ‘a criminal institution’ at the service of the Olympic organisation. We italicised some of these linguistic resources, and kept capitals as seen in the original:

It starts the splendorous action of the São Paulo Police, the specialist in the many modalities of violence. Urgent: São Paulo Police prohibits the access to the free hall of the Masp [museum]. Hundreds of cops besiege the place. Demonstrators start to take the streets against the Olympics. (Jornalistas Livres, 05 August 2016)

This is Rio de Janeiro’s Police. They exterminated everything, and everybody celebrates and mocks. THIS IS THE TRUE OLYMPICS! (Coletivo Papo Reto, 03 August 2016)

A part of the association between Olympics and the ‘militarisation’ of Rio de Janeiro might have blamed the Organisation with the repression of protests and people, but this kind of reporting gave continuation to an agenda that started long before the Olympics. The Games as a ‘battle against the oppressed’, they argued, ‘lacked fairness, democracy, and social justice for the affected communities’, as says this piece of reporting by the Coletivo Papo Reto:

The participation of the favelas in the Olympics is to have our life militarised, to live in the containment of the poor, under the rifle of the state… (Coletivo Papo Reto, 03 August 2016)

The use of metaphors (the containment of the poor; agents of the state) is, for producers, a pun with keywords, as at the same time it weaponises jargons to sensitise society on the growing police violence that only punishes one part. If the build-up was a national failure, it has not necessarily tainted the event’s image. During these episodes of protests and street demonstrations, the same trick served them in seizing the momentum to speak to other audiences, although only a few publications seemed to have this intention when they discouraged visitors from elsewhere to visit Rio de Janeiro. On the other side, local demonstrations were less prominent during the month on the mainstream media, and when they appeared, it came up as vague reports, as this news piece from the G1 website illustrates:

Police arrests demonstrators in a protest march against the Olympics in Central São Paulo. (G1, 05 August 2016)

There were moments of material disruption during ceremonies (e.g. attempts to disrupt the torch’s route, or isolated threat to tourists), but producers did not seem to dwell on these events much. What mattered for most of them, especially to those based in the favelas, was, as said, the increase in violence and the cancellation of housing programmes that appeared as deriving from the decision to host the Olympics. While the producers we watched have not revealed any attempt to join other forms of protests, for instance, by giving their accounts of boycotts or invasions, if there were any, several topics were clearly part of their usual reporting routine, as they perhaps should be, even if the event was not going on, as seen:

With at least 92 [people] shot, [the city of] Rio de Janeiro starts with the lead medal in the Olympics. Bullets cut the air in the City of God just when Rafaela Silva was going up to the podium to receive Brazil’s the first gold medal. (Jornalistas Livres, 23 August 2016)

At the favela, the poor’s alarm clock is rifle’s shooting. Since 06h30 a.m. [there was] a police operation and shootings on the CPX, with the presence of CAVEIRÃO [tank] and helicopters. Here the Olympics are for target shooting! (Coletivo Papo Reto, 02 August 2016)

Shootings were naturally a priority for many of the reports, overshadowing the unprecedented moment for favela athletes and visits from celebrities or media reporters. Detail-rich description of these crimes (who were the victims, the tactics of the police to ‘shut’ follow-up protests or the presence of the caveirão, (the feared police tank) in communities, which appeared more often than any development tied to the Olympics, as seen in publications in mid-August:

War in Vila Cruzeiro. An intense shooting happened this morning in the Proletarian Park with one police officer wounded. As a result, two local dwellers were shot in the neck. One of them died. (Coletivo Papo Reto, 18 August 2016)

On the other hand, as the Olympics settled in, there was a growing abandonment of any attempt to cover the Games, with an increasing return to the everyday life. We approach now the coverage that appeared during the final week of the Olympics, in which a broader political resistance against Rousseff’s impeachment has taken place amid most producers, while others sought to boost an awakening to the state of Brazilian politics.

The times of ‘Olympic’ crisis

Both economic and political turmoil had affected the narrative of success that Brazil was pursuing when it became a candidate to host the Games. As we discussed briefly in the Introduction, the inherent attachment of producers with the left, and their aim to battle what they called as a coup d’état, reduced their coverage as their interest in the Olympics, having even less highlight as it headed towards its end. The clearest example of this pattern emerges from Jornalistas Livres. The anger from this group with the interim President led them to mention potential flaws of the Olympics but only to look once more at Brazilian politicians and personalities that were working for Rousseff’s fall. In various public gatherings and other meetings of this period, producers expressed dissent, while completely detaching them from the Olympics, as seen in this post:

Today the Mr Interim President congratulates the Brazilian medallist athletes as if the medals had fallen from the sky, and he says the moment is historic. For you, the behaviour of this man is:

( ) Cynical

( ) Opportunist

( ) Coup-plotter

( ) All of them

( ) Other (With no personal insults, please).

(Jornalistas Livres, 21 August 2016)

What interests us here is the extent to which language resources such as metaphors, re-frames and linkages confirmed that the alternative media did not show interest in replacing the Olympics’ ‘base narratives’, as counter-narratives existed, but did not aim at the broader public. The Jornalistas Livres channelled their anger against the trampling of the Workers’ Party out of power, but they did not mean to stop the Games from going on, or its competitions from happening in live broadcasts:

The most desired item in the Olympics are the ANTICOUP fans, which are blessings for the activists favouring democracy. At the opening of the 2016 Olympic Games, the fans came up with messages denouncing the ongoing non-Olympic coup in Brazil, written in three languages: Portuguese, English, and Spanish. Let’s see this person shake up these fans with the suggestive ANTICOUP wings. (Jornalistas Livres, 15 August 2016)

(…) Look at us back there in the presentation of the female athletes of the 100m final. THE COUP IS CHAUVINIST. TEMER OUT! (…). (Jornalistas Livres, 16 August 2016)

The first of the above pieces mixes street activism and what they called ‘souvenirs of the Olympics’, which vowed to engage citizens, but through cryptic or performative language. Besides this mention, in the last weeks of the Olympics, no other story related directly to the event, as publications from the Agência Pública focused on dismantling the impeachment proceedings:

Double standards: Documents which Pública analysed show that at least 17 governors have broken the law, committing the pedaladas fiscais (fiscal manoeuvres), but still had their accountancy approved. Among them, the impeachment commission chief, senator Antonio Anastasia (PMDB-MG). (Agência Pública, 29 August 2016)

We are looking at: During all her term as President, Dilma R. received accusations of keeping a distance from the MPs in the Congress. On this Monday, the licensed President intends to face the senators and fight for her mandate. Find out what is at stake. (Agência Pública 28 August 2016)

If we look at news reports on the G1 website from the same days (e.g. the closing ceremony, athletes who travel back to their countries and the preparations for the Paralympics), it is not possible to approximate any of these stories to what the alternative media covered. The below examples attest to different stories:

Temer receives Olympic athletes and says he will follow what the Senate decides. (G1, 29 August 2016)

Suspects of selling cocaine with Usain Bolt’s image are arrested. (G1, 26/08/2016)

Paralympic athletes are warmly received at Rio’s airport. (G1, 31 August 2016)

To this article’s main questions on hijacking the Olympics’ media platforms, the prevalence of non-hijack frames suggested that outlets were more inclined to providing original reports, focused on specific social issues. Aware of this disinterest, we can also see that between the same producers, there lie different emphases too and ways of interpreting the ephemeral, but disruptive presence of the Olympics and its legacy.

In sum, the outlet based in the favela (Coletivo Papo Reto) tended to report facts and events more connected to these communities, bearing little reference to the mainstream media efforts to promote the event; the investigative agency (Agência Pública) covered at distance and focused on the build-up; and the outlet aimed at leftist politics (Jornalistas Livres) did criticise the Olympics, but hesitated before promoting further disruption. For all, the language was one of metaphors, ironies, with which they could trigger expressions of easy catch-up and which alluded to Brazil’s high inequality. No textual reference regards the Olympics media apparatus, while no ‘piggyjacking’ or similar tactics appeared. These aspects inform us about the centrality of Brazil’s political and economic crises, without which producers might have diverted less covering and engaging with the Olympics. Given such circumstances, the Olympics had relative importance. From this point on, we develop on what we perceived as a form of ‘autonomy’ that marks the position of the alternative media during the Olympics, which detaches from the opportunity-grabbing activism visited in earlier sections and which based this article’s first assumptions.

From hijacking platform to discursive autonomy

The main takeaway from this month of coverage of the Olympics in Brazil’s alternative media lies in noticing the unchanged reporting routine of the alternative media as opposed to any expectation that could plan or test a ‘hijacking’ of the event through their coverage (Burchell, 2015; Price, 2008b). Producers have debated inequality, evictions, police abuse against minorities and disrespect for human rights, amid widespread allegations of democratic rupture. In contrast with the celebratory tone of media events (Roche, 2002), the alternative media fostered parallel conversations that did not skip the event entirely, but which are far from the homogenised coverage of the mainstream media (G1).

As far as there was no clear Olympic ‘platform’ or ‘base narrative’ to which these practices were realistically disruptive (Price, 2008b: 90–93), producers did not introduce themselves as ‘counter-reporters’, nor did they seem to have attended the events. There were, thus, complementary narratives to the extent that they borrowed names and facts from the Olympics, but not to mimic or encompass the event’s unfolding. Therefore, it is preferable to speak of this repetition of frames as a discursive autonomy than of a silent witnessing or total ‘renunciation’ to journalism principles. Although we cannot invest in this term at length, it suits us to define the constant attempts at building a taxonomy that reminded their audience of what was going on (e.g. ‘lead medals for the state’ to remember the lead metal of bullets), but which does not characterise a ‘platform hijack’ according to past cases. The pressing issues addressed as a result of the Olympics (e.g. evictions, repression, budget) would have become ‘news’ in any case.

The definition of platform continues to be problematic though. Here, we have limited it to seeing the Olympics as a media platform in itself, in which case producers have only subtly approached both the IOC and the media organisations that covered it at length (Dayan and Katz, 1992; Tomlinson, 2014). Their true opposition was regarding the public budget that funded the event and the dominant narrative that justified it, against which they employed ironies and metaphors to build ‘counternarratives’ (Price, 2009: 89). As far as this terminology was borrowed from how the Olympics Games have worked in modern age, here we found producers neither affected by IOC’s ‘ownership’ of the event, nor they intended to appear as ‘free riders’ of transmissions. In brief, they did not hack, appropriate, divert, or interrupt live streams with their own coverage, which are the ultimate meaning of platform in contemporary literature (Price, 2008b: 91).

Several protesters made themselves noticed on the media, as it was the case of those carrying ‘Temer out’ signs into the stadia ¹ , of whom some were escorted out of the games. This article points to another kind of activism that has not shown up in the Olympics Park, but which represented a slow kind of resilience, different from the interruption of the competitions or the appropriation of coverage infrastructure. That said, the concept of ‘platform hijack’ remains attractive to test other kinds of disruptions that are not newsworthy for the mainstream media; the extent to which small-scale media producers can offer feasible paths to make audiences skip media events or raise consciousness about its negative aspects resonates as another kind of ‘platform’, similar to that of current literature (Burchell, 2015; Dayan and Katz, 1992; Price, 2008b), but from which disruption is still to be further tested, especially in contexts of intense political crisis, as it was in Brazil. Future research must detail the power of discourses that seem autonomous towards the event, those that do not resort to ‘seizing’ or ‘reproducing’ the Olympics or its media structure (Miah et al., 2008; Price, 2008a). By elaborating on these and other possibilities, it is possible to determine the exact weight of the multiple counter-narratives presented here; the extent to which they can enrich the taxonomy and repertoire of the local population in the long-term in the face of existing political tensions that go along with media events. The power of such indirect, slow-feeding form of ‘hijacking’ media events, we argue, will depend on media producers’ affordances and the robustness of their attachment to local agendas.