Tutela da honra nas redes sociais: a contribuição possível da teoria da impolidez

Abstract

This work aims to assess a possible contribution of impoliteness theory, a theory originated from the field of study of pragmatics, to the enforcement of injunction and liability mechanisms regarding the protection of people’s honor, on social network sites. Offences on honor are a constant issue in these environments, and take many different forms, like cyberbullying, hate speech, fake news, revenge porn and fake profiles, in constant intertwining with offences to other personality rights. Impoliteness theory asserts that people take offence presumably when the attributes associated with their identities are not ratified by other people, and that impoliteness judgements come from the frustration of people’s expectations regarding the appropriateness of their assessment or reference to one another, in a given context. The examination of the expressions of offence on honor on social network sites confirms this hypothesis. Additionally, impoliteness theory asserts that offence on digital environments is produced especially through textual genres that are typical of those environments — hashtags, memes, emojis — that index offensive posts to other posts, creating context. However, indexation is not exclusive to these figures; it runs out of the hypertextual structure of digital texts as a whole. Brazil’s Internet Civil Statute offers injunction and liability mechanisms regarding offences on honor on Social Network Sites. The offence being a situational phenomenon, dependent on context, the evaluation of the offensive post’s hypertextual web, including the post’s with which it is indexed and the discourses to which it is affiliated, is held to be fundamental to the analysis of its conditions of enforcement. Pain and suffering arbitration regarding offences on honor on Social Network Sites can also take into consideration the elements of footing when assessing the case’s circumstances, especially the fact’s severity and the agent’s liabilities.