The clearest way to see the first variable in the equation is to watch a case where the volume curve online and the crowd curve on the ground rose together, and then walked into the same building. January 8, 2023, in Brasília, is that case.
The physical facts are on the record. One week after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn in for a third term, thousands of supporters of the outgoing president, Jair Bolsonaro, converged on the Praça dos Três Poderes, breached the security perimeter, and entered three buildings in sequence: the Congresso Nacional, the Palácio do Planalto, and the Supremo Tribunal Federal. They vandalized chambers, offices, and courtrooms. Bolsonaro was in Florida. The federal response, coordinated through the Supreme Court and the newly installed executive, cleared the buildings within hours and detained the participants at the encampments that had stood outside army barracks for weeks.
Those are the outputs. The variable is upstream. What made January 8 legible as a case of engineered saturation, rather than a spontaneous riot, is that the online buildup is documented and timestamped.
The buildings were walked into online before they were walked into on foot.
Two independent open-source efforts were watching the curve. NetLab, the internet-and-networks lab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, tracked political content across Telegram, WhatsApp public groups, and Twitter through the 2022 cycle and into the transition. The DFRLab at the Atlantic Council documented a surge in election-fraud narratives on Twitter in the weeks after Bolsonaro lost the second round on October 30, 2022, led by the #BrazilWasStolen hashtag and its variants. Read against the rubric, what they documented was a curve that did not behave like an ordinary post-election news cycle, which peaks on the losing side in the days after the count and then decays. NetLab recorded antidemocratic content rising after the second round. DFRLab found the hashtag concentrated in a small group of very active accounts and amplified well beyond Twitter.
The language of a stolen election had been rehearsed at scale for more than two months before it was cashed in. AP’s explainer, filed from Salvador the day after the attack, ties that rehearsal to a physical staging ground: the encampment outside army headquarters in Brasília, where sympathizers had been demanding a military intervention since the October 30 runoff, and the buses that brought others to the capital for the weekend.
This is what Volume means as a variable. One viral post does not amount to saturation, which is what happens when the count of adjacent, mutually reinforcing claims across multiple channels stays above the threshold at which a responsible actor can plausibly answer them, for long enough that a fraction of the audience begins to organize its life around the flooded world. The threshold moves with the size of the audience, the capacity of the counter-institutions, and the strategic patience of the operator. What does not move is the shape of the curve when the operator has run the play well: a rise that does not decay, and does not need to, because it is being fed.
Two clarifications the case forces.
First, volume in this sense is a different thing from reach. The accounts driving the January 8 buildup did not need to reach most of Brazil’s online public. The material only had to be dense enough, and durable enough, inside the sympathetic subnetwork to convert ambient grievance into a bus ticket. Volume is priced against the window it occupies. Reach is priced against the population.
Second, the operator is more than one actor. The final report of the parliamentary inquiry, the CPMI do 8 de Janeiro, gives an account of the encampments, the caravans, and the money behind the mobilization. Volume, at this scale, is a property of the system as a whole. That is what makes it hard to prosecute and harder to prevent.
The lesson for the rubric is narrow. When a saturation event arrives at a physical location, work backward. Check whether the volume curve on the topic was decaying or rising before the event, whether the rise was organic or fed, and where it migrated when a platform intervened. A case that answers rising, fed, and migrated smoothly describes a landing rather than a riot.
Next week: F is for Frequency, and the 2024 Romanian annulment.
— J.W.B.
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