HATE DISCOURSE IN SOCIAL MEDIA AS PERSUASIVE STRATEGY FOR POPULISM

ABSTRACT This article takes a step backwards and tries to understand our current moment by analyzing social media context in a 2017 social hashtag movement. Our data show that prior to the 2018 presidential campaign, there was already evidence of digital populism (CESARINO, 2018). The digital apparatus for mobilization (production and sharing of Twitter hashtags), as well as the political strategy of establishing a friend-enemy syntagmatic axis. More specifically, the aim here is to analyze political discussions, within the framework of virtual lynching (MACEDO, 2018), in two ways: (i) by means of network models applied to online social networks, as described in Recuero’s works (2005, 2014) and Lima-Lopes’ works (2017, 2018) and; (ii) by an analysis of the appraisal discourse (MARTIN and WHITE, 2005) present in some Twitter posts and its applications to Portuguese (VIAN JR et. al, 2010). Our analysis relies on the Twitter hashtag #Dia28EuVouTrabalhar. It was created and disseminated aiming at countering the General Strike scheduled for April 28, 2017, in order to protest against labor and social security reforms. Data scraping and connection graphs were performed with the aid of NodeXL and Gephi software, respectively. As a result, we could observe that the main influencers in the network were of great importance in the dissemination of hate discourse, because the large number of followers allowed such discourse to spread on a large scale. It is worth mentioning that the central node of the studied network was a state deputy from Rio de Janeiro and the son of a politician, who later got elected as the presidency of the Republic. Feelings regarding dissatisfaction were the more common. They were projected towards the political party that was in office in Brazil for fourteen years. Such a party had its last term interrupted by an impeachment in the year previous to this strike. Regarding the Judgment, the posts revealed a disbelief concerning ethics and reliability both in relation to the strikers and the movement organizers. We could observe that the repetition dispersion and standardization of stigmatized discourses were very common tools in the 2017 context. It is also relevant to keep in mind that such strategies still are an important instrument to obtain popular support in social media.