Você precisa ver isso! Fake news e indignaçāo moral na campanha eleitoral de 2022

Abstract

The thesis studies the connection between fake news and moral outrage within the political context, analyzing how Bolsonarists and Lulopetists discursively employ fake news to draw attention to violations or alleged violations of moral norms and accentuate political identification during the 2022 major elections. The research starts from the question: how are discursive structures constructed around fake news aimed at amplifying political discussions, and, above all, how are they used as a strategy of moral contagion during the 2022 presidential campaign? The theoretical problematization builds approaches on fake news, moral outrage, moral contagion, political-party identification, and political antagonism. The empirical corpus consists of comments collected on the Facebook fan pages of the two highest-rated presidential candidates in the 2022 election polls (Bolsonaro, PL, and Lula, PT), during the official campaign period (August 16 to October 30), totaling 78 days of data collection, during which 640 posts were recorded on Bolsonaro's fan page and 826 on Lula's fan page. To understand the meaning effects of the discourses of partisan subjects from both political groups, we adopt a qualitative approach in which comments are understood as discursive forms capable of translating the country's historical-political context (2022 presidential elections) and self-affirmation of partisan identification. Thus, Discourse Analysis as a theoretical-methodological tool of investigation allowed us to identify some priority agendas of the political groups aligned with Bolsonarism and Lulopetism and revealing the multiplicity of moral ideas that sustain the discourse of both groups. The analytical exercise revealed that, in order to defend moral values, the two groups of partisans value beliefs that correspond to their expectations and, for a greater number of people to know that a transgression against the concept of right and wrong has occurred, they seek engagement and amplification of fake news through social media. Thus, the fake news mobilized in the discourses of Bolsonarists and Lulopetists, besides being identified and contextualized, become indicators of 'storms of outrage' that mark political conversations between supporters and opponents on the fan pages of the two presidential candidates and constitute stimuli for sharing in the process of moral contagion. As a conclusion, the research points out conjectures that reinforce the proposition that the diffusion of moral content in social media environments captures attention and is amplified by fake news, corroborating with the proposition that fake news and moral outrage mutually reinforce each other. Furthermore, political identification, intervening to shape perceptions of facts, served the partisans of both political groups not only for the promotion of hostile rhetoric but also to activate political-party antinomies from the perspective of morality, placing the defense of moral values as a strong marker of this identification.