(DON’T) READ THE COMMENTS: DISPUTING THE STORY OF MARIELLE FRANCO’S MURDER

ABSTRACT This paper aims to advance contemporary understandings of the semiotic potential of comments in interactions carried out on digital platforms. We do so by observing the online repercussion of a widely discussed case: the murder of city councilor Marielle Franco. Our analytical enterprise consists in discursively scrutinizing a stream of 1.600 comments, here understood as re-entextualizations of the story itself and as vestiges of its textual trajectory in varied contexts of circulation. The results shed light on the ways in which commentators contribute to the production, expansion and dispute of discourses which characterize the ideological polarization in the contemporary socio-political landscape.