Do Consumo Compulsório à Vaquinha Digital: Como as Redes Sociais Estão Modelando os Sistemas de Proteção no Brasil

This essay argues that social media platforms have become, in contemporaryBrazil, a structural variable in the production and perpetuation of the lifeinsurance protection gap — not as a passive environment in which decisionsoccur, but as an active architecture that shapes three behaviors in sequence: thatof the consumer, that of the distribution channel, and that of the protectionsystem itself. In the first movement, platforms distort the hierarchy of incomeallocation through compulsive status consumption, digital sports betting, andidentity construction through self-display — displacing the insurance premiumfrom the budget before any conscious decision takes place. In the secondmovement, when the industry attempts to use the same platforms for consumersensitization, it encounters a structural asymmetry of engagement that favorsreflexive emotion over prudential argument — and the distribution channel,which most requires consultative mediation, operates under the same distortedincentives that divert it from that effort. In the third movement, the uninsuredloss event converts the feed into a platform for emergency begging: digitalcrowdfunding substitutes the liquidity that a policy would have guaranteed, andpredatory credit fills the space left vacant by formal insurance. The essaydemonstrates that these three movements are not parallel — they are sequentialand mutually reinforcing, constituting a circuit that conventional price andinformation interventions are unable to break.