Uncle Sam wants to know our engagement

NOn April 6th, American actor Andrew McFarlane, from the series Me, the Boss and the Children, posted a photo on his Instagram profile wearing a t-shirt with the phrase “I love my Brazilian fans”, accompanied by the caption “Hey, Brazil”. The Brazilians soon agreed on their intention: Andrew was asking for a joint effort to gain more followers on Instagram.

The idea was to surf the same wave that took actor Vincent Martella, from the series Everybody hates Chris, from 300 thousand followers to 2 million overnight (and 6.7 million until the publication of this text) after posting a photo wearing a t-shirt with the phrase “I am famous in Brazil”. Yes, Andrew repeated the formula with a straight face – and it worked relatively well. It went from 72 thousand followers to 400 thousand in a few days.

Many Brazilians celebrated the feat on social media, with an air of victory and gratitude for the attention. Others, not so much. “Now Brazil has become a corner for American sub-celebrity, the very Farm da Record incarnate”, posted @sigoinvictorrr on Twitter.

Not only “subs” (subcelebrities, as they say on social media) make use of the Brazilian engagement machine. Celebrities from the so-called “high echelons” also occasionally appeal to Brazilians to engage on the internet when they need a little extra help to “boost” their numbers.

Khloé Kardashian (one of the influencers of the clan famous for a reality show) knocked on the door of the Brazilian internet in January this year, right when Twitter was full of people commenting on the first elimination of Big Brother Brazilto ask for votes for a magazine award People. She tweeted in Portuguese ““Hi guys!! I’m not in BBB but I’m up for the People’s Choice Awards this year,” along with the link to the vote. This request caused some distrust and received responses such as “what’s that, mona?”. She won the “Reality Show Star of 2024” award at an event that took place a month later (although it is unclear whether the Brazilians had any influence on the final result).

In fact, you don’t necessarily need to be famous to get the attention of Brazilians on the internet. On TikTok, many foreign content creators have already understood that making funk moves or content with audios from national influencers is a passport for their video to be successful. The expectation is to use the thousands of views that Brazil delivers as a springboard to increase profile engagement. And, with that, the algorithm shows the account to more people.

There are creators who see this formula working so well that they decide to come to Brazil to create videos here, a growing movement in the last year. The investment seems to pay off. @EdPeople, creator on TikTok, was one of the foreigners, among many others, who chose to come to the country during Carnival to create content. He made videos in Salvador, Belém, Recife and other Brazilian cities, always accompanied by someone teaching a very local dance step, like frevo or samba. The investment seems to have paid off: the videos in Brazil always have millions of views on Ed’s profile, while the other posts have around 200,000 views.

There are some clues that show the trend is not only real, but could grow. In the last month, a trends new on TikTok, with videos titled “Brazil PR is working” (something like, “propaganda about Brazil is working”). According to the platform’s own insights tool, videos in the category already have 72 million views. The content shows people at the airport, on their way to Brazil, or booking plane tickets to come to the country. Full plate for Brazilians to watch and interact.

“I have a very critical view of tourists, or foreigners who take advantage of other people’s society for extractive consumption,” he told Piauí Joris Lechene, French-British who creates content focusing on decolonial perspectives. “I call it modern colonization. I always try to take a different approach to be careful with this,” he comments. The concern was redoubled with Brazil, as he decided to spend time in the country at the beginning of the year to create content. In his case, reflections on ancient and modern colonization in the country published on his Instagram and TikTok profiles.

On YouTube, a network that has been home to the trend of “reaction” videos to Brazilian music, films and other cultural products for years, the formula still seems to work. The channel “MontWRLDtv” published a video reacting to “Black Drama”, by Racionais MC’s, three months ago and received more than 100 thousand views. Most of the videos on the channel don’t exceed 10 thousand.

On the other hand, let’s face it: it can be really difficult to resist clicking on a video of Indians reacting to the soap opera Path to the Indies. Or Americans watching the version of They Don’t Care About Usby Michael Jackson, which was recorded in Salvador and Rio. But it’s very clear that it’s all strategy when one video seems like a copy of the other, made just to generate numbers easily.

The practice creates a fair deal for other foreign content creators. American Clinton Manigault, from the Goony Googles channel on YouTube, told Piauí who hesitated before making videos aimed at the Brazilian audience. Right at the beginning of his channel, when he had less than 10 thousand subscribers, he began to receive many requests from Brazilians to make reaction videos (in which he watches and comments on music videos) of national songs. But he was in doubt whether he should serve them. “I felt that many people were using Brazil as a visualization farm. I didn’t want to be that person,” he says.

The Brazilian audience was still there, firm and strong, asking for more reaction videos. “I kept making reactions to other things, like [a série] Breaking Bad, and gained a thousand views. But when I reacted to something Brazilian, I earned 100 thousand”, he says. Ultimately, he found his way of making videos for the Brazilian community. He then chose to immerse himself in the national culture. The twelve most viewed videos on the creator’s channel contain reactions to songs like Black Dramafrom the Racionais, She leftby Tim Maia, You Turn My Headby Alcione, and even Brazilian films, such as Elite squad. In November last year, he moved to Brazil. Today he lives in Goiânia (GO).

If someone manages to gain the attention of the Brazilian public on the internet, like Clinton or Khloe Kardashian, they soon realize that engagement is high and very focused. A privilege in relation to internet behavior found in other countries, such as the United States, for example, with a huge population connected to the internet, but greater competition and a more dispersed audience. But it also has a much broader media landscape, with more channels and press outlets. In other words, even more famous people vying for public attention all the time.

It’s not difficult to see this when looking at the social media numbers of these celebrities. In a quick comparison, you can see that Khloe receives an average of 3 thousand comments on her Instagram posts, a number very similar to those of Brazilians Ludmilla and Juliette – both, however, with around 30 million followers, a tenth of Khloe’s contingent.

In addition to appearing to engage in a different way, the Brazilian population with internet access still spends much more time online than many other nations: around 9h30 a day, while the world average is around 6 hours and 37 minutes a day .

If well stimulated, Brazilians go like a huge, fast-moving wave. A mix of Brazil’s excited and welcoming culture, perhaps with the famous stray dog ​​syndrome that gives this eternal desire to be seen and validated by foreigners. To top it off, the culture of joint efforts, which is increasingly consolidated on social media – see the big movements that happen during the BBB, for example. A great online scavenger hunt that sometimes comes loaded with feelings other than pure fun, such as revenge and justice.

This year, Christian Chávez, from the band RBD and the first version of the soap opera Rebel, shown on SBT, attributed to Brazilian fans the success of rescuing his YouTube channel, which he had lost in a fight with his former businessman. Brazilians helped mobilize YouTube to pay attention to the case, a way to help the actor get justice.

The story of actor Vincent Martella is another example of a great online prank seasoned with emotional motivations. The idea of ​​giving Vincent more followers, created by Brazilian fans themselves, was to make his Instagram surpass the number of followers on the profile of actor Tyler James Williams, his colleague from the series. Everybody hates Chris. Tyler, the protagonist of the series, committed the sin of criticizing the excess of comments from Brazilians on his posts. This happened around 2016, but Brazilian fans of the series remember it. And, apparently, hurt.

The collective effort took place not only on Instagram, but also on Facebook and Twitter, and even ended up on TV. On April 4, a TV Record program showed the number of followers of the co-star of Everybody hates Chris on the studio screen, while the presenter celebrated the achievement by saying: “We were the ones who started the campaign.”

In the end, Vincent Martella did very well with it all. He came to Brazil, allowed himself to be photographed wearing the national team’s shirt, participated in TV shows, podcasts, starred in a Burger King commercial made for Brazilian territory. In parallel, the atmosphere in the comments on his Instagram entered that attention phase before becoming a crisis. Many Brazilians expressed impatience with the fact that the actor does not add subtitles in Portuguese to the new videos that are being uploaded to his profile, which leaves the content inaccessible to his new majority of followers. There are comments like “petition to translate the content” with more than 80 thousand likes. Perhaps there is a foreshadowing of a lack of patience among fans towards the actor, if he does not respond to the requests of his new millions of followers – who will know if he really wanted it.