POLARIZATION IN INSTAGRAM COMMENTS ABOUT FORMER PRESIDENT JAIR BOLSONARO

Abstract

The conversation on social media generates numerous possibilities of studies to understand the relationships between text and society. In this article, it seeks to analyze the representations of the former president Bolsonaro on social media by three national newspapers during a specific event, examining how these representations were constructed and evaluated by their authors. We developed a qualitative research to evaluate these representations of the former president Bolsonaro and we started from quantitative data about the resumption of this referent from the collection of 357 comments from 3 posts published on the Instagram social network on September 7, 2022, by the newspapers Correio Braziliense, Folha de S. Paulo, and O Globo about the activities that the former president carried out during the celebration of Brazil’s 200th anniversary of independence. As a result, we verified the polarization among the internet users around the representations of the former president that were categorized into 7 types, as well as the influence of the title of the post in the resumption of the referent Bolsonaro and in the evaluation of his representations.