Facebook in Brazilian schools: mobilizing to fight back

In this article, we analyse how students made use of social media as a form of human-technology interaction for the organization, development and expansion of activities in four social movements. The Four Movements were a combination of Occupy-type protest, in which students occupied more than 200 schools, and demonstrations, in different cities of the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, using Facebook pages as a communicative mediational tool. We analyse the Facebook pages involved in The Four Movements using the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) framework, focusing on the notion of collaborative agency for the development of such movements. As data, we used the content of 122 Facebook pages related to The Four Movements. We performed a qualitative analysis of the data to understand how the movements developed and what results the students obtained. Our findings suggest that by acting collaboratively students could obtain satisfactory results from their protests and expand their activities to other contexts.