Gestão da pandemia: como o presidente usou o twitter para divulgar o argumento do tratamento precoce e influenciar seguidores?

Abstract

Social networks have played a central role in the political debate, becoming an important platform for positioning governments in their interactions with the governed population. Among them, Twitter has drawn attention for being a platform for disseminating open access short texts with the possibility of issuing opinions and speeches to its users. In this environment, many political leaders have used these resources to seek support for their opinions in order to establish an agenda of priorities to be followed by the public. Given this context, the current work analyzes the public pronouncements in posts by President Jair Bolsonaro on his Twitter profile in order to verify how this social network enabled the dissemination of the idea of “early treatment” to combat COVID-19 in the first year of the pandemic in Brazil in 2020, and how much it influenced the users of the platform. The research consists of a descriptive study, using content analysis to characterize the President's publications with the help of the MAXQDA v.22 software, as well as quantitative analysis to describe and categorize the tweets collected. The investigation was based on the analysis of favorable impressions from the levels of use of the social network (likes and retweets) on Twitter, in addition to simple correlations between these variables and public opinion polls which assessed the pandemic combat by the government. The results obtained revealed a variation of the influence inside and outside the network, indicating considerable influence within the platform, without, however, showing influence on the topic outside of Twitter.