Abstract
The victory of Jair Bolsonaro in the elections of 2018 was marked by several challenges from the point of view of political communication. With little TV time, his campaign was characterized by the strong performance in digital media, especially in WhatsApp. In this paper, we try to understand the communicative dynamics and the electoral strategies that were used by the campaign in the app. We analyzed 194.710 messages from 21 support groups for Bolsonaro between September 5 and November 11. The analysis showed that i) a small group of participants concentrated most of the posts; ii) the most shared links include other social media, such as YouTube and Facebook; iii) there were centralized actions of campaign to neutralize damages to the image of Bolsonaro, as well as to coordinate votes for its parliamentary base. The results show the potentialities of using WhatsApp, but also emphasize that the application should be understood within a broader communicative network.
Keywords
Political Communication; Elections; WhatsApp; Social Media; Jair Bolsonaro
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Source: Prepared by the authors.
Source: Prepared by the authors.
Source: Prepared by the authors.