Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

The internet and its social networks are quickly changing the manner interpersonal and institutional relations happen, allowing people to constantly share information about themselves and others, therefore, diminishing the distance between the facts and the receivers. The impact of this evolution must be analyzed according to the Brazilian conjuncture, which is marked by corruption scandals, political polarization and political, economic and social crises. Consequently, the importance of tolerance values for an effective functioning of the democracy must be emphasized, especially in the sense of respecting and accepting divergent opinions.
Through analyzing the youth public that spend a big portion of their day online, it is known that the internet contributes to the internalization of political values by its role as a socialization agent. Accordingly, the objective of this paper is to verify whether the internet produces a hostile political culture among youngsters, creating a more intolerant youth. The hypothesis we developed is that the more time the young people spend online, the more they tend to have hostile attitudes and behaviors, increasing the political intolerance in the virtual and real world. The data used is based on a 2015-2016 research from the Núcleo de Pesquisa sobre a América Latina (NUPESAL – UFRGS), with 13 to 24-years-old students of public and private schools from three capitals of the South of Brazil (Porto Alegre/RS, Florianópolis/SC e Curitiba/PR).
It is believed that due to the recent political events in Brazil, the internet seems to contribute to guide political intolerant attitudes towards divergent opinions, which generates the hate speech and the polarization of opinion among young people. Such attitudes seem to reinforce the political culture presented in the real world to the virtual world, since in Brazil, according to longitudinal studies, population in a general way do not show interest in politics and as a result, they remain intolerant to those issues.
Thereby, within this scenario of intolerance, the ability to supervise the action of the public authorities as the political participation and the constitution of social capital by the population are disrupted. This puts at risk the democratic stability, since it corroborates to the maintenance of economic, political, and social inequalities that in their turn keep the majority of the population aside from public politics and absent from new initiatives of conventional or non-conventional political involvement. In this sense, the results found corroborate the hypothesis that there is a maintenance of the political culture present in the previous generations, detaching the lack of interest, hostility, and political intolerance among youths.