Abstract

VARAO, Rafiza; FERREIRA, Fernanda Vasques  and  BOSELLI, Marco Aurélio. We, the People? An Automated Qualitative Analysis of Who the People Are on Jair Bolsonaro’s Twitter. Palabra Clave [online]. 2023, vol.26, n.2, e2621.  Epub May 23, 2023. ISSN 0122-8285.  https://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2023.26.2.1.

One pillar of democracy is its definition, according to which it represents the government of the people, by the people, for the people. Thus, the people category plays a decisive role in democratic countries, both institutionally and symbolically, and is used as a component of the most diverse discourses and positions in the democratic spectrum, including populism and its digital aspects. This article investigates the construction of the idea of people in Jair Bolsonaro’s tweets, trying to understand how this construction takes place and what idea of people can be deduced therefrom. We evaluated whether the data corroborated a populist stance on the part of the president’s official profile on Twitter. To this end, tweets archived in the “Wayback Machine” containing the word “people” were collected from December 31, 2019, to June 17, 2022. Checking was done directly on Twitter using the collected identification numbers to search for the tweets. We identified that the notion of people in Jair Bolsonaro’s speech on Twitter is unclear, but these “people” are called to support the populist politician, resulting in mobilization and a permanent political campaign focused on disinformation with an appeal to emotion and religiosity.

Keywords : Democracy; populism; social media; Twitter; Jair Bolsonaro.

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