Comunicação política e construção da realidade: o WhatsApp nas eleições presidenciais de 2018

Abstract

This thesis is part of the set of works that aims to understand the victory of Jair Bolsonaro in the 2018 presidential elections. To this end, deals with the fields of political sociology, sociological theory and political communication, addressing the dispute from its communicative innovations and, in particular, the patterns of sharing of political content on WhatsApp during the period. The research has an exploratory and analytical character. From an exploratory point of view, it establishes a dialogue with the studies that map the dynamics of communication in closed instant messaging applications, carrying out reflections from a database formed by forwarding content to the Project Comprova fact checking consortium. This database gathered audios, images, texts and videos and had 1176 unique contents and 48,817 total uploads, constituting a different way from those built through the direct extraction of contents from public groups and, thus, allowing a complementary perspective for understanding of the content in circulation in the app during the campaign. From an analytical point of view, the investigation is based on the content analysis methodology and on qualitative research on specific topics in circulation during the period. The results confirm the predominance of Bolsonaro's campaign on the app, as well as the great presence of negative content, nonprofessional audiovisual records and content on fraud in the electronic ballot box, which were the most shared both in single submissions and in total referrals. From these elements, an approximation with the theories of the construction of reality was carried out, seeking an alternative explanation to the perspectives that attribute the political effects of the mediated experience to centralized manipulation or emotional triggers. The analysis of the database also informed reflections on how communicative transformations change dynamics of classic themes of political communication, such as the production of negative propaganda and disputes over framing the public debate. Finally, it is argued that the communicative dynamics of the Jair Bolsonaro campaign mobilized basic mechanisms of reality-building processes, which were enhanced by the incorporation of the application into the interactive dynamics of everyday life and thus created a form of electoral communication capable of renew the relationship between citizens and politics.