Who Sets Your Attention? Real Jiwasa, Metacognition, and the Factory of News Useful to Power

The most important question in front of a news item is not only “is this true or false?”. That is the question of the effect. The causal question is: who is trying to set my attention, why, at this exact moment, and with what consequence for body-territory? A news item can be true and still be used to produce fear, volatility, votes, distraction, resentment, consumption, monetization, or obedience. The problem is not only the lie. It is the factory of agendas that chooses which pains become visible, which causes disappear, and which groups will be emotionally moved.

NeuroInsight already offers an important foundation for this by reminding us that perception is not born pure: it is built through the relationship between consciousness, explicit attention, implicit attention, past experience, and attentional focus. Its text on worldview states that attention filters and prioritizes sensory information, while consciousness gives lived experience to that information. This means that an agenda does not enter only into opinion; it enters the body. It decides what will be felt as urgent, what will seem threatening, what will be forgotten, and what will be interpreted as reality.

For this reason, an agenda is a political technology. Whoever controls the agenda does not need to control all facts; they need to control the emotional order in which facts appear. First comes the scandal, then fear, then outrage, then the ready-made solution. The body thinks it is choosing freely, but often it is only reacting to a carefully assembled sequence. The hidden cause may be market, election, lobbying, reputation, culture war, speculation, legislative distraction, or protection of elites. The news appears as information; the agenda functions as direction for social metabolism.

Jiwasa enters here as a criterion. In another NeuroInsight text, the politician of the future is described as someone capable of perceiving the Jiwasa of each group: young people, workers, researchers, families, Indigenous peoples, quilombos, entrepreneurs, teachers, urban territories, and standing forests. This helps distinguish Real Jiwasa from false Jiwasa. Real Jiwasa increases belonging, responsibility, and territorial return. False Jiwasa gathers bodies around fear, enemy, and excitement, but does not return life. An agenda may seem collective and still be only a capture machine.

Contemporary media has made this capture faster. The Reuters Institute observed in 2026 that, in Brazil, traditional media continues to lose ground as a source of news, while AI chatbots grow in popularity and the use of social networks for news remains high, in an environment of low trust and changing consumption habits. The visible effect is apparent plurality. The cause may be fragmentation of attention. When each person receives a different sequence of agendas, the shared territory of reality weakens. The country does not merely discuss different facts; it begins to inhabit different emotional rhythms.

This environment favors agendas useful to power. A useful agenda does not need to be invented. It can be a real crime, a real statement, a real crisis, a real study, a real video, a real mistake. The trick is to transform the real into a partial trigger. The effect is shown without the cause. The armed young man is shown without the financial flow. The flood is shown without the model of occupation and deforestation. Food prices are shown without the chain of credit, export, and tax exemptions. Low-level corruption is shown without the legal engineering above. The agenda manufactures visibility, but it also manufactures blindness.

Brazilian electoral disinformation shows that the problem is multiplatform and multimodal. A 2024 study analyzed false claims in the 2022 Brazilian general elections on WhatsApp, Twitter, and Kwai, showing that the same claims can appear in different formats, details, sizes, and languages on each platform, making automatic matching and rapid response difficult. The cause here is not only “fake news.” It is narrative mutation: the same agenda changes body to survive. It becomes audio on WhatsApp, a short video on Kwai, a screenshot on Telegram, a headline on X, a comment on YouTube, and then “public opinion.”

Emotion is the engine of this factory. Recent studies on prebunking in social media feeds show that manipulative content exploits emotions such as fear and outrage, and that warning people in advance about emotional manipulation techniques can increase cognitive resistance to misinformation. This is a key to metacognition: before asking “do I agree?”, ask “what do they want me to feel?”. Fear accelerates. Anger simplifies. Disgust dehumanizes. Shame silences. Euphoria shares. When emotion comes before causality, the agenda has already entered the body.

NeuroInsight had already formulated this path by treating metacognition as the ability to think about one’s own thinking, helping evaluate the origin of beliefs, the validity of information, and the emotional processes that influence what we believe and share. This is the basis of the reader’s manual. Metacognition is not coldness. It is causal pause. It does not mean not feeling. It means not handing the whole body over to the first stimulus. The pause asks: does this agenda want to inform me, regulate me, or capture me?

The manual begins with five questions. First: which body-territory appears, and which one disappears? Second: does the news show the effect, or does it reach the cause? Third: who benefits if many people feel this at the same time? Fourth: does this agenda ask for care, punishment, consumption, voting, investment, hatred, or distraction? Fifth: does it increase Real Jiwasa or false Jiwasa? If the agenda only produces enemy, urgency, and repetition, but does not return territory, it is probably hijacking attention. If it expands context, responsibility, and concrete action, it may be serving Real Jiwasa.

The second step is to recognize the timing of the agenda. Agendas useful to power often appear at convenient moments: before votes, during economic crises, in weeks of investigation, in budget disputes, in government transitions, during market drops, in climate tragedies, or in electoral periods. The question is not conspiratorial; it is methodological: why now? Timing is also data. A true news item published at the right moment can displace attention from a larger cause. The metacognitive reader does not deny the fact; they ask which causal chain was interrupted by the fact.

The third step is to observe repetition. When the same agenda appears with small variations across many channels, profiles, clips, memes, comments, and videos, there may be spontaneous synchronization, but there may also be an agenda operation. The Carnegie Endowment observes that media literacy can help people identify false stories and unreliable sources, but warns that effectiveness depends on the approach and that large-scale interventions face challenges of speed, cost, and reach. This reinforces the need for daily training, not only occasional fact-checking. Attention needs education just as the body needs posture.

The fourth step is to distrust agendas that ask for identity before causality. “Are you on our side?” is a bubble question. “What cause produced this?” is a metacognitive question. False Jiwasa demands quick belonging: share, attack, defend, cancel, buy, vote, hate. Real Jiwasa allows delay: let us understand, compare sources, locate interests, listen to the territory, separate fact from interpretation, recognize uncertainty, and act without dehumanizing. The agenda that does not allow pause wants to turn the reader into a soldier.

The fifth step is to recover the body. NeuroInsight defines Jiwasa as the body realizing that it is not isolated in the task of existing; in Jiwasa, the body begins to metabolize. This applies to news. No one metabolizes reality alone all the time. We need circles, teachers, communities, reading groups, responsible journalism, public science, media education, culture, and secular rituals of care. Another NeuroInsight text states that media and education for the state of the body matter because attention is not only a channel; it is a collective state and can be trained.

The conclusion is simple: whoever sets your attention tries to set your world. The factory of news useful to power does not need to lie all the time; it only needs to choose the frame, the timing, the emotion, the enemy, and the repetition. Against this, the reader needs metacognition, Real Jiwasa, and body-territory. It is not enough to ask whether the news is false. We must ask whether it is bringing us closer to the cause or trapping us in the effect. Because a society captured by agendas reacts a lot and transforms little. A metacognitive society feels, pauses, asks, locates the cause, and returns attention to the territory.

Selected references after 2021

NeuroInsight — “Plano de Governo para Todo Corpo-Território”

Supports the idea of perceiving the Jiwasa of different social and territorial groups, avoiding the reduction of politics to a single agenda or a single character.

NeuroInsight — “Como nossa Cosmovisão muda nossa percepção?”

Supports the basis on attention, consciousness, and the construction of perception, showing that an agenda acts on the way the body selects and interprets the world.

NeuroInsight — “Como a Metacognição, Resiliência e Empatia atuam no combate a Fake News?”

Supports metacognition as a tool for evaluating beliefs, sources, confirmation bias, and emotional reactions to information.

Reuters Institute — Digital News Report: Brazil — 2026

Supports the Brazilian context of traditional media losing ground, AI chatbots growing, and social networks remaining highly used for news.

Hale, Belisario, Mostafa, and Camargo — “Analyzing Misinformation Claims During the 2022 Brazilian General Election on WhatsApp, Twitter, and Kwai” — 2024

Supports the analysis of multiplatform disinformation in Brazilian elections, showing how false claims change format and language across platforms.

Van der Linden et al. — “Prebunking misinformation techniques in social media feeds” — 2026

Supports the idea of cognitive inoculation against manipulation techniques, especially content that exploits fear and emotion on social networks.

Carnegie Endowment — “Countering Disinformation Effectively: An Evidence-Based Policy Guide” — 2024

Supports the importance and limits of media literacy, showing that it can help identify unreliable sources but requires scale, time, and the right approach.