Discursive strategies for disinformation on WhatsApp and Twitter during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election

This paper aims to analyze and compare the discursive strategies used to spread and legitimate disinformation on Twitter and WhatsApp during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election. Our case study is the disinformation campaign used to discredit the electronic ballot that was used for the election. In this paper, we use a mixed methods approach that combined critical discourse analysis and a quantitative aggregate approach to discuss a dataset of 53 original tweets and 54 original WhatsApp messages. We focused on identifying the most used strategies in each platform. Our results show that: (1) messages on both platforms used structural strategies to portray urgency and create a negative emotional framing; (2) tweets often framed disinformation as a “rational” explanation; and, (3) while WhatsApp messages frequently relied on authorities and shared conspiracy theories, spreading less truthful stories than tweets

YouTube as a source of information about unproven drugs for Covid-19: the role of the mainstream media and recommendation algorithms in promoting misinformation

In this study, we address how YouTube videos promote misinformation about hydroxychloroquine in Brazil. We follow two research questions. RQ1: How is pro-hydroxychloroquine content propagated on YouTube? RQ2: How does YouTube’s recommendation system suggest videos about hydroxychloroquine on the platform? We use mixed methods (content analysis and social network analysis) to analyze 751 YouTube videos. We found that most pro-HCQ videos in our dataset are posted by mainstream media channels (RQ1) and that YouTube was more likely to recommend pro-HCQ videos than anti-HCQ videos (RQ2). Consequently, the Brazilian mainstream media and YouTube’s algorithms fueled the spread of pro-HCQ content

Framing Covid-19: how fact-checking circulate on the Facebook far-right

This research focus on how fact-checking links circulate on Facebook groups/pages that also shared disinformation, particularly, the ones affiliated with the far-right. Through a three-step method that included content analysis, discursive analysis and social network analysis, we analyzed public 860 posts and found out that: while fact-checking does circulate on these groups, they tend to be framed as disinformation through posts on far-right ones, which we call “explicit framing”; the far-right groups tend to cluster around specific fact-checking links that are mostly shared without a framing text, but whose theme support their own ideological narrative (which we call “silent framing”) and; both explicit and silent framing tend to happen through populist discourse connections

Bolsonaro and the Far Right: How Disinformation About COVID-19 Circulates on Facebook in Brazil

This article tackles the circulation of disinformation and compares it to fact-checking links about COVID-19 on Facebook in Brazil. Through a mixed-methods approach, we use disinformation and fact-checking links provided by the International Fact-Checking Network/Poynter, which we looked for in CrowdTangle. Using this data set, we explore (1) which types of public groups/pages spread disinformation and fact-checking content on Facebook; (2) the role of political ideology in this process; and (3) the network dynamics of how disinformation and fact-checking circulate on Facebook. Our results show that disinformation tend to circulate more on political pages/groups aligned with the far right and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, on religious and conspiracy theory pages/groups and alternative (hyperpartisan) media. On the other hand, fact-checking circulates more on leftists’ pages/groups. This implicates that the discussion about COVID-19 in Brazil is influenced by a structure of asymmetric polarization, as disinformation spread is fueled by radicalized far-right groups

DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGNS ON TWITTER DURING THE BRAZILIAN 2018 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

This proposal focuses on discussing the results of two-year study about disinformation in political conversations on Twitter during the 2018 presidential campaign in Brazil. Based on a dataset of over 20 million tweets, we explore the research question: What are the key characteristics of the disinformation campaigns aimed to influence the Brazilian 2018 election through political conversations on Twitter? To discuss this question, we aligned our results with three key aspects of the disinformation campaigns: (a) content strategies; (b) legitimation strategies and (c) spread strategies