On the night of the first presidential debate on open TV, this Thursday, the 9th, the hashtag #existepesquisanobr continued on Twitter. Associated with #DebateBand, the tag was used to demand from candidates their positions on research funding in Brazil. Even earlier, several tweets brought the hashtag in comments about yet another threat of grant cuts, this time linked to the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and the Financier of Studies and Projects (Finep). (Read the open letter of the president of CNPq)
A week ago #existepesquisanobr emerged on social media, inspiring researchers to talk about the work they do, as a form of mass scientific dissemination. It came in fourth place among the most talked about topics on Twitter in the world and second in Brazil. On August 2nd, it only lost in Brazil's trending topics to #AbortoÉCrime. What few people know is that it all started with the outrage of a Unicamp researcher.
Alexandre Fioravante Siqueira, post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Cosmic Rays and Chronology (DRCC) at the Gleb Wataghin Institute of Physics (IFGW) at Unicamp, was outraged by a statement by presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro (PSL) in an interview with the program Roda Viva (TV Cultura) on July 30th. Participant of Unicamp's science blogs, author of the blog "Programando Ciência" and of research involving image processing for application in geophysics, Siqueira did not swallow the candidate's words and tweeted a kind of challenge to researchers, addressed to Bolsonaro:
That same day, the Capes letter, addressed to the Ministry of Education, on the possibility of interrupting the payment of postgraduate scholarships. #existepesquisanobr, which had already achieved some projection, fit like a glove. “We managed to unite researchers around a common good. Everyone was discouraged but they were happy to be able to publicize their research and realize that no one was isolated,” says the postdoctoral fellow.
Hashtags are words that come together and carry the “tic-tac-toe” symbol. On social media, they are used to bring together discussions and are generally in the spotlight for a short time. But not in this case.
From the human, exact, technological, biomedical areas; from inside and outside Brazil, from scientific initiation to postdoc, there are still people giving their opinion and telling about their research. An avalanche of science on timelines.
And it's not just in Portuguese. Many Brazilian researchers explained in English what it was about and also managed to get the engagement of scientists from various countries, who adopted the hashtag. According to Alexandre, the presence of researchers on Twitter is very strong, as is Bolsonaro.
Master's student Dayane Machado helped Alexandre propagate the tag when it was launched, directing the tweet to scientific communities. Researcher at the Laboratory for Advanced Studies in Journalism (Labjor) at Unicamp, she works with the image of science and scientists in online scientific dissemination.
According to Dayane, it was a combination of factors that caused the hashtag to explode on social media. There was Bolsonaro's statement and the news from Capes, but even before that, science communicators and scientists from the Saber project promoted a hearing with some presidential candidates on the structural importance of Science in the country's development. Statements also came from there that had already bothered researchers. In yet another interview, Geraldo Alckmin, candidate for the PSDB, stated that postgraduate studies could be paid for.
Dayane adds that researchers need to talk about their work and that some tweets even took a stance against public funding of science. “The debate about who the scientist is comes to the fore. Is it the hired professional who is at the university, teaching, or is it the postgraduate student? There is a discussion involving postgraduate studies that says that we don't work, we only study, that we don't have a profession. And in fact, the scientist’s profession is not regulated in Brazil”, she highlights.
#existepesquisanobr even generated “threads” which are sequences of tweets that complement each other, written to explain how research works in Brazil, how, for example, payments to scholarship holders are made.
Alexandre and Dayane agree that the hashtag has strength, but they believe that the scientific community also needs to engage in another way, demanding political action from the societies that represent it with government officials.
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