#FraudenasUrnas: Disinformation’s Discursive Strategies on Twitter During Brazilian 2018 Elections

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the discursive strategies used to legitimize disinformation in social media, particularly on Twitter. Our dataset focuses on disinformation regarding suspicion on frauds in the electronic ballot during the 2018 presidential election. Based on this event, 276,875 retweets and 84,577 tweets exclusively with disinformation from political conversations were collected and legitimation strategies of the fifty most successful tweets were examined (VAN LEEUWEN, 2007). The results point to the association of personal authority and moral evaluation as the key components of the most successful validated retweets. Thus, users with authority in these medias have a significative importance for spreading this type of discourse.